


Lighthouse Living

by airandangels



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Gen, Jasper Redemption (Steven Universe), Past Abuse, Physical Abuse, Recovery, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-02-03 08:05:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12744342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airandangels/pseuds/airandangels
Summary: Peridot and Jasper are both recovering from their relationships with Lapis Lazuli and end up supporting each other when they try living together in Peridot's new home, the lighthouse above the Temple.Here is the theme song of this fic.In terms of time setting, I started this a week after the "App Bomb" running from "Dewey Wins" to "Kevin Party" and it builds on Lapis' abandonment of Peridot in that sequence of episodes but it is set at a vague near-future point in which Jasper has recovered from her corruption, at least insofar as she is bipedal and verbal again but she's still processing a lot of feelings about her experiences.  I am leaving precisely how that happened vague but it was probably broadly similar to my earlier story "Back to Beta."





	1. Chapter 1

By the time Peridot returned to the lighthouse, the rain had mostly blown out to sea.  Standing in her garden and leaning on the white picket fence, she could see blue-grey clouds trailing dark veils of falling water over the surface of the ocean.  The hydrangea shrubs were rain-washed and glistening in the pale sunshine.

“Thanks for going for a puddle-stomping walk with me,” she said to Amethyst, who had come to lean beside her.  “I don’t know why she’s being like this about it but if it helps her to get inside and settle down before we see each other, well, whatever.”

“Jasper’s in kind of a weird place,” Amethyst said, wringing rainwater out of her hair.  “She doesn’t look exactly how she used to and she’s kind of self-conscious about it.”

“She virtually has to look better than the last time I saw her!  Ha!  I can say that to  _ you, _ right?  I mean I’m obviously not going to say it to  _ her. _  I remember how vain she was.  Not without reason, but yes.”

“Yeah, maybe hold back on that with Jasper.  You don’t have to bite your tongue or anything, just… yeah, I think she’ll be okay once she gets used to the change but let her bring it up if she wants to.  Some of it is her choice, after all.  She might  _ wanna _ talk about it.”

“The hard part used to be getting her to stop.”  Peridot snorted at the reminiscence.

“Did you even like her?” Amethyst asked doubtfully.  “If you’re gonna try to share a house…”

“I wasn’t thinking about liking her at the time.  You know how I was, all business.  My social skills are  _ much _ better now.”  She hesitated a moment.  “Aren’t they?”

“Of  _ course _ they are, get outta town.”  Amethyst slapped her on the back, so it was fortunate she was leaning on the fence or she might have fallen on her face.  Peridot  _ liked _ Amethyst’s strength, in fact, she might  _ love _ her strength but it could be overwhelming at times.

“So I’m sure I can get along with her if I try,” Peridot went on, trying to compose herself.  “And she tries too.  I’m not going to talk to her like a Kindergartener talking to a Quartz soldier — even though that’s what we  _ are. _  I’m going to talk to her like Peridot, a Crystal Gem who’s had to start over, to Jasper, an Earth Gem who is also starting over.  I’ll be kind but I’ll look out for myself too.  And I’ll talk about it with you, just like we said, so I don’t get all isolated and out of touch with friendship norms again.  It’s really going to be so much better with you just down the hill.”

“Yeah, we can hang whenever.”  Amethyst bent and plucked a snail off a leaf, placing it on the back of her hand and watching it gradually, cautiously extend its head and horns.  “You know, when you decided to stay up at the barn so far away, I don’t know… I didn’t want to be weird and clingy about it but I felt like you weren’t all that interested in us any more.  I wondered if I’d done something wrong.”

“You never did anything wrong,” Peridot said quickly.  She put her hand on Amethyst’s arm well away from the snail and tried to give it a reassuring squeeze.  “I thought then the most important thing was for me to put things right.  Fixing up the barn after I made a mess of it.  I was really looking forward to the sense of accomplishment, the proof I was better than I was before.  Once I’d done that, I was expecting I’d come back, but then Steven turned up with Lapis and she was so angry, and that seemed like another thing for me to put right, another way I could be better.  It… got complicated.  I’m sorry.  I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Not your fault I didn’t say it,” Amethyst said, shrugging.  She was still looking at the snail but Peridot thought she looked a lot happier than a mere snail warranted.  “It’s okay.  I’m glad you came back and you like it here.”

“I’m glad  _ you _ helped me make the garden and get all moved in.  You, uh, you can have that snail if you like it.  As a gift!  Till the flowers grow.”  All they were showing so far was tight, pale buds so she was a way off from her goal of adjusting the pH of the soil to produce flowers exactly Amethyst’s shade of purple and bringing her a double armful of them.

“Aw, Dot!  I’ll treasure the little slimeball.”  Amethyst gave her a big crooked grin and she felt her own face warm up in answer.  “C’mon, let’s go see Jasper.”

 

Peridot had cleared the second floor of the lighthouse for whatever Jasper wanted to have there while retaining the slightly larger ground floor for herself and Pumpkin.  After all, there were two of them.  Down here she had a couch and a TV that the human who had vacated the premises had been prepared to part with, and a pile of blankets and cushions where she and Pumpkin would curl up for naps, and if the place was still a little bare that just meant she had room to expand and decorate.  She hadn’t really felt like making any meepmorps since Lapis left but she was growing some interesting plants in pots that were too delicate to cope with the wind and salt spray outdoors.  She had her tablet, she had a crate containing some snacks to share when people who liked that kind of thing came to visit, and generally she had it pretty good, considering.

She hadn’t been sure what, if anything, Jasper would want to have in her living space so she’d kept it basic and provided something to sit on (a big squishy mattress sourced from Amethyst’s hoard of miscellaneous stuff), something to look at (a poster of a tiger that she thought Jasper might enjoy aesthetically) and something to mess with (a jumbo-size stress ball).

At Steven’s suggestion, she left him and Amethyst eating chips on the couch (the snail had a leaf because the chips were too salty) and watching  _ Storage Wars _ while she gathered Pumpkin in her arms and climbed the helical staircase to the upper room to say hello.

Jasper was lying on the mattress, curled up on her side, but she sat up quickly when Peridot appeared.  She didn’t look scared or alarmed, just very… alert.  For a few moments they just looked at each other in silence.

Peridot could see now what Amethyst meant about Jasper looking different.  It looked as if her colouring had permanently changed, with streaks of green intermingled with her own shades of orange.  Everything was the right shape again, but her vast mane was gone; her hair was as short and fluffy as if she’d just emerged in the Kindergarten.  It made Peridot want to take charge and give her training and guidance, and she had to remind herself very firmly that that wasn’t how it was going to be now.  

“Um, hi!” she said.

“Hello,” Jasper said.  Her voice was still gravelly but much more muted than Peridot had ever heard it before.  Her eyes flicked down toward Pumpkin in Peridot’s arms.  “Who’s that?”

“This is Pumpkin!  She’s my pet.  Steven brought her to life after I grew her with — well, you know who.  Are you going to be okay if I talk about her?”  She had had a  _ deeply _ unpleasant scene with Lapis when she had first thoughtlessly mentioned Jasper early on — Lapis had been so upset that she had felt horrible, asking her  _ why _ she would ever say that, and so Peridot had tried to  _ explain _ why she said it and that only escalated things, Lapis telling her she had no idea how she felt, she couldn’t begin to imagine what she had been through… Peridot really didn’t want to remember it all now, because it was so confusing to remember her mortification and her desperation to make it right at the time and how much  _ better _ she felt when Lapis was calm and happy again alongside what Amethyst had told her later about Lapis having no right to try to  _ make _ her understand how she felt, that taking or breaking something of Peridot’s each time she got her that upset wasn’t Lapis teaching her to be a better friend at all.

“About Lapis?” Jasper asked.  

“Yes.  I don’t mean I’m going to go on and on and on about her, but — but I need to be clear.”  She took a deep breath, remembering how she’d rehearsed this.  “Sometimes I need to talk about her, because she was a big part of my life for a while and she hasn’t even been gone that long.  I don’t want to pretend she didn’t exist or it didn’t matter.  We don’t have to have long conversations about her if you don’t want to, but just — if she comes up, if I mention her, can you handle that?”

Jasper frowned, but she looked puzzled rather than angry.  “You’ve never held back from saying whatever you wanted around me before.  It could be annoying but I always thought it showed you had some grit.  Why is this any different?”

“Well, because… she  _ really _ didn’t want me ever to mention you.  It was… pretty bad.  And I can’t deal with that again.  No, I mean I shouldn’t  _ have _ to deal with that again.  You can say ‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ you can leave the room, that’s all right, but no… no punishing me.”  Pumpkin whimpered and Peridot realised she was holding her a little too tightly and relaxed her grip guiltily.  Pumpkin jumped to the floor and shook herself, the leaves of her tail rustling.

“Punishing you?” Jasper repeated, her lip curling.  “Don’t worry.  Listen, I understand what she was like.  You’re probably the only other person who does.  I was  _ hoping _ we could talk about it.  When I try to explain what it was like to Steven or Amethyst or Pearl they just look so worried about me and I feel…”  She trailed off.  Pumpkin had scampered over and was sniffing at her foot, hanging off the side of the mattress.  “Uh, hi.”  She held out one hand, surprisingly gently, and after pulling back a little Pumpkin ventured forth again and sniffed it, then let Jasper scritch her cheeks.  

“I think I know that feeling.”  Peridot crossed the room to crouch down beside Pumpkin and scratch behind her stem the way she liked.  “It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me.  Like one time Steven and Amethyst and I were all talking and they were kind of laughing at themselves, remembering times they made mistakes and got themselves into a pickle and it was embarrassing or troublesome, like Steven messing up shapeshifting and having to go through the car wash to get rid of all the cats, or when Amethyst ate most of a turducken before realising it was spoiled and… yeah, that wasn’t good, and I was trying to join in so I said, ‘Haha, yeah, or the time I asked a dumb question about Jasper and Lapis had to drown my alien plushie to teach me a lesson,’ and they both just  _ looked _ at me like…”  She trailed off too.  “And then there was a whole big  _ talk _ and they asked a lot of questions and then they talked to Garnet and Pearl and  _ they _ asked me questions and then  _ they _ got all worried and started apologising to  _ me _ and saying they hadn’t realised how serious it was and they should have been paying more attention and not avoiding us because they felt guilty about how  _ they’d _ treated Lapis and it was all so awkward… yeah.”

“Pearl apparently feels really guilty that she didn’t save me when Lapis and I split up and I slid into the ocean.  I didn’t even know she tried because I was knocked out at the time.”  Jasper shrugged one massive shoulder.  “I’ve tried to tell her not to feel bad, I mean, no one would ever expect  _ her _ to protect  _ me… _ she actually got a little mad about that and said she was capable of a lot more than I knew, and it was a lot easier talking about that.  Kind of like it when she lectures me.”

“Pearl  _ is _ surprisingly capable!” Peridot agreed.  “No one here is what you’d expect, are they?  At first it just seemed  _ ridiculous. _  An Amethyst who’s small.  A Pearl who fights and engineers.  A fusion who’s like that for love and companionship, not power!”

“You never did get any more tactful,” Jasper said with a brief grin.

“Oh.   _ Oh! _  Whoops.”

“I don’t care.  I’m never doing  _ that _ again.  No power is worth being someone’s punching bag.  I don’t ever want to do that to someone else again either.  You do those things because you’re desperate and it just poisons it.  That’s what I think, anyway.  Does she like being picked up?”

It took Peridot a second to understand Jasper was talking about Pumpkin again.  “Yes, she’s fine with it.  She’s a very cuddly vegetable.”

“Did you say you  _ grew _ her?” Jasper cupped her large hands under Pumpkin’s tummy and lifted her into her lap.  “Like in a Kindergarten?”

“To a certain extent.  It’s a little different.  I could explain it all to you but it would be easier to demonstrate sometime.  I think she likes you.”

“I like her,” Jasper said, and sat quietly holding Pumpkin, so unlike the restless, irritable, constantly moving Jasper Peridot had known on the voyage here it was a little unnerving.  A Jasper who had learned to be gentle and still.  That was another surprise.  She boosted herself off the floor and sat on the edge of the mattress beside her.

“I think we should be able to live together pretty well, then,” Peridot said.  “That was the big thing I was worried about.”

“Whether I’d like Pumpkin?” Jasper asked, giving her a sidelong look.

“No, whether — oh.  You’re being  _ funny.   _ I suppose you learned that from Amethyst.”

“I’m learning a lot from Amethyst,” Jasper said, nodding slightly.

“Isn’t she so great!?  But my point is, when I lived with Lapis I was trying really hard to be a perfect friend who never upset her and always made her feel better.  I thought that was what I was supposed to  _ do. _  I felt bad for her having been through so much and… and her feelings just seemed more important than mine.  Well, I want you to feel better too and I want to be a good friend but I think my idea of perfection wasn’t really helping.  We need to both be able to say what we think, and our feelings are equally important.  Garnet was very emphatic about that.”

“It sounds like she did it a different  _ way, _ but she used you and dumped you too, didn’t she?” Jasper asked bluntly.  

Peridot sighed, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around them.  “I think she did.  I still want to remember the nice parts, because there  _ were _ some nice parts, but in the end she took almost everything I had, everything I thought we were sharing and she just… left.”  She stared hard at the wood grain in the floor, telling herself that that knot shape looked like Pearl’s head which was quite interesting and she definitely wasn’t going to start crying about all that  _ again. _  “It’s not the same as what you went through, I’m not trying to claim that it was, I think that must have been much wor —”  She stopped, feeling a large, warm hand come to rest lightly on her upper back.  Very warm.  That was such a Quartz thing.  She closed her eyes as Jasper rubbed a little circle there, slowly, the touch feeling a little hesitant but still very comforting.  She heard raindrops rattle against the windowpane again.  

“Isn’t rain weird?” Jasper asked.  “I remembered it from when I was new, but it was so long I didn’t really remember how it felt and sounded and smelled.  I like the smell you get afterward.”

“It’s good for the plants,” Peridot said.  “The first time I saw it I didn’t know what to think.  I was  _ scared _ of it.  Now it’s one of my favourite things here.”

“The whole damn planet is so  _ watery,” _ Jasper said.  “No wonder she’s so powerful here.”

“Well, she’s not here now.  And we still are.”

They sat in silence, listening to the rattle and shush of the rain, the faint chatter of the TV from downstairs, and after a while Peridot shifted to lean her head against Jasper’s arm.


	2. Chapter 2

After a couple of weeks, Peridot was getting used to having Jasper around.  She wasn’t exactly a perfect roommate.  It had been a mistake to put her upstairs because she tended to walk around restlessly late at night, and Jasper seemed constitutionally incapable of treading quietly, but Peridot was still attached to the big ground floor room so she either turned up the volume on the TV or a white noise generator on her tablet and that helped her ignore the thumping.  It was certainly different from living with someone who padded around barefoot and sometimes got around without walking at all.  

Peridot hoped one day she’d be able to watch _Camp Pining Hearts_ again but right now it was as if Lapis had flown away with not just the DVDs and tapes of the show but also Peridot’s ability to enjoy it.  She’d torrented the first season and tried to start her own rewatch from scratch but couldn’t get through the pilot for crying.  Fortunately Jasper had been out then, on one of her cross-country Thinking Walks, so she hadn’t felt self-conscious about just bawling into a cushion.  The crying worried Pumpkin, though, so she’d turned off the video since it really was just making her feel worse and let Pumpkin lick the tears off her face and took her outside for a run around and some corn-cob fetching.

“I really shouldn’t cry,” she was telling Pumpkin when she saw Jasper at the base of the hill, beginning the climb towards them.  “I mean, it is _just a show._  So what if it was one of the first things that I was able to engage with emotionally while trying to start a new life in a completely different world?  So what if I shared it with someone I wanted to help through the same transition I was going through and I believed it was something that really bonded us together as kindred spirits?  There must be _dozens_ of shows.  Hundreds, even.  I can always get into another one.  She can _have CPH.”_

“What are you lecturing that poor vegetable about?” Jasper asked, lumbering into earshot.  

“Well, I was just,” Peridot began, and then stopped as a connection she had never quite made clicked into place.  “She _can’t_ have _CPH.”_

“What’s CPH?” Jasper asked.  She didn’t need to ask who “she” was; “she” with a certain inflection always meant Lapis between them by now.

“ _Camp Pining Hearts_ is my favourite television series.  We always watched it together.  Well, she took all my DVDs and the TV when she left, but she can’t watch them!  There’s no electricity in space!  She’s not getting any benefit out of them either!”

“Small victories,” said Jasper with a wry smile.

“I don’t know if it’s a _victory_ per se but the whole time I’d been imagining she was going on with the Season Four rewatch and we’d never get to talk about it.  Well, I guess we still won’t get to talk about it, but at least we both stopped in the same place.  I don’t know why that makes me feel a little better about it, but it does.”

“Well… good,” said Jasper.  “I still don’t fully get the appeal of TV.  I tried watching _Crying Breakfast Friends_ with Steven because he thinks it’s so great.  I guess the warning is in the title but seriously?  Eleven minutes at a time of food crying.   _Food_ crying.  Pumpkin is food, technically, right?  She doesn’t just cry, do you, bud?”  She crouched down and scratched behind Pumpkin’s stem, setting down the paper sack she had been carrying.  “I helped Pearl do the grocery shopping and she was like, ‘Pick a treat!’ and I was like, ‘Seriously?’ and she was like, ‘You’ve earned it,’ so I got you some diet cola and mints for that gross video you want to do with Amethyst.”

“Wow, thanks!  Wasn’t there anything you wanted for yourself?”

“Not really,” said Jasper, raising her arm.  There was a row of three Pearl Point stickers down the inside of her wrist.  “Punctuality, Perseverance, Positivity, nailed it.”

“What were you punctual for?” Peridot asked, examining the rolls of mints to make sure they were the right kind (Jasper had done well).

“I showed up just when she was thinking it’d be nice to have someone come along and help her.”

“She should give herself a point for Partiality.  You’re so her favourite.”

“I’m her remedial student who needs the most encouragement, you mean.”

“Watch out or you’ll get stripped of that Positivity sticker.”

“Psh, she can’t hear me,” said Jasper, and then looked over her shoulder to make sure it was true.  She pushed herself to her feet and strolled into the lighthouse, picking at one of the stickers with her other hand.  Peridot guessed they would end up with the others stuck on the ceiling of Jasper’s room.  Jasper had been very scornful at first about Pearl’s efforts to motivate her with stickers, but not, Peridot had noticed, when Pearl was around to hear it.  

“You should just admit you like the Pearl Points system,” Peridot said, following her in and stashing the paper sack in the snack crate.  

“I’ll admit it beats the time-honoured Agate training method of whipping and yelling,” Jasper rumbled, slinging herself down on the couch with her treetrunk legs stretched out in front of her.

“Oh, so no more of the ‘that’s what made me strong’ bluster?” Peridot asked, clambering onto the arm of the couch.  “I remember you having a lot to say about _that_ on the ship.”

Jasper snorted and slouched lower.  “I think I’m over measuring my strength in how much punishment I can take.”

“Well, good.”  Peridot reached over and patted her shoulder.  “I mean, I do think you had to be strong to endure everything you did, but if I can be a role model to you in anything let it be realising your strengths aren’t limited to what you were made to be good for.”  She folded her arms, feeling she’d made a good supportive point.  Jasper gave her one of her sidelong glances that could mean she was waiting for Peridot to get a joke or else that Peridot _was_ the joke but the new and improved Jasper wasn’t going to laugh right at her.  Whatever, her sense of humour was weird.

“So what other shows are good?” Jasper asked.  “Please tell me they’re not all about crying.  I can do my own crying.”

“You never cry,” Peridot said, surprised.

Jasper looked away a moment.  “Yeah I do,” she said.  “I just know how to do it quietly.”

“No wonder you and Pearl get along.”

Jasper turned back swiftly, her eyes blazing.  “Don’t you dare tell Pearl about me crying.  She thinks I’m a wreck as it is.  One word out of you and I’ll cram that tablet down your throat.”  Peridot could see her stop herself, tightening her hands.  Her own hands were tight on the squashy arm of the couch and her throat felt tightest of all.  “I’m sorry,” Jasper said quietly.  “I take that back.   _Please_ don’t tell Pearl about that.  It’d be really embarrassing.”

Peridot nodded and swallowed carefully.  

“Are you okay?” Jasper asked.  “I promise I’m not going to do anything to your tablet.  Or you.  That was a crappy thing to say.”

“Mmhm.  Yeah, I’m okay.”  She knew she was now.  It had been a bad moment but it was over, she was reminding herself it was over.

“I’m sorry.  I’m so _stupid.”_ Jasper hunched over, clutching her head.  Her hair stood out between her fingers in tufts.  Peridot could hear her breathing gustily.  “I’m still doing it,” Jasper said between her teeth.  “Don’t listen.”

“Well,” Peridot said carefully, sliding down to sit on the seat of the couch, “Lapis wouldn’t say she was _stupid._  She’d say she was terrible, hateful, she could never go home because of what she’d done.  I’d just try to make her feel better.  I — I told her she just did what she had to do.  I’m sorry about that now.”  She wrapped her arms around her knees.  

“You don’t have to say you’re sorry.  You’re not doing anything wrong.  I just…”  Jasper took a deep breath.  “I _feel_ stupid, I _feel_ mean and ugly when I…  I feel like I’m just what she used to tell me I was.”

Peridot reached out one hand and patted her tense back.

“You don’t have to try and comfort me when I was just mean to you,” Jasper said, her head still down.  “Don’t force yourself.”

“I don’t feel as hopeless when I think I’m taking care of someone else,” Peridot admitted.  “I’ll stop if it’s bothering you.”

Jasper sighed and sat up straight.  “I just need to calm down,” she said, wiping under her eyes with the heel of her palm.  She gave a shaky smile and held out her hand.  “Real tears.  Like a dumb cartoon waffle or something.”

“It is _really_ not a good show,” Peridot said, relieved to have something to safely criticise.  “It’s just so _maudlin._  Oh, boo-hoo, we’re crying, don’t you feel like crying too?  A-bloo-hoo-hoo.”

“Waaaah,” Jasper added, wiping her hand on the leg of her pants.  “Let’s all _wallow_ in our _tears.”_

“Let’s see what else is on TV,” Peridot suggested.  “Just change channels and see if we can find something good.  And if we only find garbage we’ll tear it to pieces with our razor wit.”

They ended up watching all six hours of _Kingdom of Plants_ after catching the tail end of an episode and digging up the rest of it online.

 

It was a windy night.  Peridot could hear the wind wailing and whistling around the crown of the lighthouse and the ocean breaking roughly on the beach down below.  There was no need for a white noise app with all that going on.  She didn’t need to mask out Jasper’s noise, anyway; she was being quiet up there.  Peridot wondered if she was sleeping.  Sleeping was such a good respite from everything else, as long as you were sensible enough to do it in a bed you weren’t going to fall out of.  Her heap of pillows and blankets was on the floor already, and so was Jasper’s mattress.  Did she sleep?  Had she mastered the art?  Amethyst had probably taught her.  Did Jasper snore?   _Could_ Jasper snore?

She wanted to be asleep herself, but it just wasn’t happening.  Pumpkin was contentedly snoozing beside her, her tail curled up round her bulbous orange body.  Peridot carefully eased herself away without waking her and went to sit on the couch with her tablet.  She didn’t want to watch anything.  She’d started to enjoy watching nature documentaries with Jasper, it turned out there were a lot of them, but they didn’t have any continuing plot (apart from the habitat getting depleted, which was pretty grim) and the nice wrinkly-faced human in the blue shirt was only a recurring character in some of them.  It was easier for them to both watch them on the tablet if Jasper held it and Peridot sat in her lap, or else Jasper lay down on her side and Peridot lay just in front of her.  

They had both felt a little awkward about getting into that arrangement at first but it soon became comfortable, particularly because Jasper always felt warm to the touch, like she had just been out in the sun.  She would sometimes rest her chin on top of Peridot’s head, slightly crushing her hair, but that felt comfortable too.  It seemed like Jasper still had her physical restlessness but it was grounded if she happened to be holding someone or something alive.  

When they found that exhausted, shivering seagull lying in the garden with its leg and one wing entangled in the rings of a discarded plastic six-pack yoke, Jasper had scooped it into one huge palm and after a few moments it had just stopped shivering; it lay there blinking calmly while Peridot figured out the tangle and didn’t even flinch when she had to make a few strategic snips with scissors to free it.  The tight plastic had bitten into its leg and armpit — wingpit? — pretty deeply, so it couldn’t get up right away, but it nestled in Jasper’s hand with the other laid over its back like a blanket while Peridot searched online for bird troubleshooting tips, and then while they carried it down into town to find a veterinarian to take a look at it.  That had been a fairly stressful and annoying process and Peridot had had to lay down the law several times to get any kind of _service_ but Jasper had been rock-steady and calm throughout, and had silenced a barking dog in the waiting room with a stern look which was pretty cool.

After a few days’ rest and feeding the seagull had flown away one morning without a backward glance.

“Well,” Peridot had said, her shoulders sagging, “I don’t know what I expected.”

Jasper had looked from her to the dwindling seagull, back to her, then stooped to pick up a stick and pulled back her arm to throw it.

“Nonononono!” Peridot had leapt up and grabbed Jasper’s arm with both hers.  “I mean I appreciate the _sentiment_ but you know how strong you are, you’ll obliterate it!”  She dangled, realising how close she’d just come to being flung along with the stick, but it seemed that her weight was enough to stop Jasper following through on muscle memory.

“Yeah,” Jasper had said after a moment, dropping the stick, “I’m... bad at plans.”  She looked down at Peridot as she lowered her to the ground, frowning, but if she had anything further to say about that she turned away and went back to dibbing holes for sunflower seeds with her forefinger without saying it.

However, the seagull had come back for a while in the afternoon, and had paid them occasional visits ever since, walking around the garden jerking its head belligerently and occasionally shrieking.  With the sounds of wind and now rain rushing around her, Peridot swiped through the photos on her tablet, Seagull perching on Pumpkin’s back, Seagull nesting smugly in Jasper’s hair, an action shot of Seagull swooping and swiping a chip clean out of Amethyst’s hand (Jasper had laughed raucously and Amethyst had spear-tackled her and the two of them had rolled straight through the picket fence and bounced down the cliffside, landing on the beach with Jasper curled in a protective ball around Amethyst; Pearl had squawked louder than Seagull even though only the fence was broken).  They’d gone from one pet to one full-time pet and one part-timer.  Quite some growth.

She hadn’t wanted to get _rid_ of her pictures and videos with Lapis in them but they had definitely been a temptation to make herself feel worse by combing back through them, and so she had copied them all onto a USB stick and then, with Steven patting her back, deleted them from the tablet and the cloud.  The USB stick was safe in a box on a shelf.  She liked to think she was also protecting Jasper from accidentally seeing something that would upset her, although Jasper said she didn’t care at all about _seeing_ Lapis; she might just be talking tough and anyway feeling protective helped strengthen Peridot’s resolve not to go back and wallow in her regrets.

She still wondered sometimes, even at a time like this when she was looking at nice pictures she’d taken while having fun with the friends who still cared about her, what she could have done better, at what point she had gone too far.  She had wondered aloud about that once until Jasper, who had been helping her set up the sprinkler system, had thrown down the hose and growled, “It doesn’t matter _what_ you would have done, she was what she was!  If you’d stood up to her more she would’ve found a way to beat you down or she’d just have left sooner.  Look, you got the _light_ version, all right?  The guilt and the shutting you down and the victim act.  You know how bad that was, and you _know_ that was still her holding back!  Hearing you talk is like — like — I _know_ how horrible and helpless it feels to admit it but you have _got_ to know you _never_ had it in your power to make that go right!”  

“Don’t yell at me!” Peridot had snapped back, and Jasper had sat down heavily, breathing hard.  She was quiet for a long moment, looking at her hands, and then she said, “I can hear myself and I know I sound like I’m mad at you and I think you’re dumb.  I’m not.  You’re not, I mean.  I’m so bad at talking about anything I care about.  It all comes out sounding angry.  I don’t want you to blame yourself any more.  Even with what-ifs and maybes.  As long as you’re still thinking like her part of it was up to you, she’s still got you and I’d hate that to happen to you.”

Peridot had hugged her and promised not to keep doing that, and Jasper had hugged back and promised not to yell, although both of them knew it was more of a promise to try than a promise to succeed.  Here she was still doing it, just in her head instead of out loud.  Jasper probably yelled a lot in her head too.

Peridot took her mind off it for a while, or tried to, by playing _Plants Vs Zombies_ but it wasn’t very effective.  She wondered if Jasper was awake and doing something quietly or actually just asleep.  Then she remembered Jasper saying she knew how to cry quietly and became absolutely convinced that Jasper was upstairs silently crying alone, and that made _her_ feel like crying, and she didn’t want to do _that_ alone so she put down the tablet and crept up the stairs just to make sure.

Before she got her head up into the room she reached her arm over and knocked on the floor.  Jasper might or might not be doing anything private but it was a small thing to do.  There was no answer, so she went up another step and peeped over.  The room was dark; there was very little moonlight showing through the bare windows because of the rain.  Jasper was just a large, still shape lying on the mattress.  

She’d done nothing to personalise her room except for sticking her Pearl Points on the ceiling.  Peridot had brought her a cactus in a pot, since it was from a desert environment like her, and a minky brown fleece blanket, since she herself found blankets and quilts comforting, and a cool lamp with coloured wax inside it that liquefied and glooped around in blobs when it had been turned on awhile, because that was just objectively awesome, but the place still looked bare and unlived-in.  At least Jasper had put the cactus on a windowsill so it would get sunshine, and it looked like she was using the blanket.  

Maybe _one_ day she would take more of an interest in customising her space; Peridot could only try to encourage her.  She’d thought someone who cared so much about her own appearance would take more of an interest in aesthetics, but since Jasper’s looks had changed a bit maybe she didn’t feel the same any more.  Or on the other hand, maybe she would like a mirror in here.  That was a thought for tomorrow.  

Peridot padded over to the mattress and knelt down by Jasper’s head.  She was just about to tap her shoulder or otherwise ascertain that she hadn’t cried herself to sleep when the room was filled with white light and a moment later a roar of thunder from just overhead.  Peridot shrieked and dived under the blanket, burrowing down.  Jasper woke with a startled grunt and reflexively clapped her knees together and trapped Peridot’s head between her thighs.  There was a moment’s bewildered silence apart from the roar of the rain and wind.

Then Jasper said, “Damn, Peridot, try giving me flowers first,” and released her.

“I was _not_ — I just  —” Peridot struggled up from under the covers and had just got her head free when the light and the noise happened again in quick succession and she dived down to curl in a ball against Jasper’s stomach.  

“Oh, okay,” said Jasper, lifting the blanket to look down at her.  “You can stay, but if you kick you’re out.  I didn’t know you were scared of thunder.”

“I’m not!  It startled me!  It was so close I thought we’d been struck by lightning!”

“But there’s a lightning rod on the roof,” Jasper said patiently.  “You pointed it out and explained it — at length — the day after I moved in when you showed me over the grounds.  If we get struck by lightning we’ll still be safe.”  She dropped the blanket and laid down her head again, pillowed on her arm, as if that was that.

Peridot stuck her head up indignantly.  “Were you suggesting I made some sort of _pass_ at you?”

“I was only joking,” Jasper said, her eyes closed.  “I thought it was an Amethyst kind of joke.  You’d like it.”

“I came up here to make sure you were all right!  I thought you could be sad, or lonely, or you couldn’t sleep…”  Peridot faltered.  “I woke you up, didn’t I?”

“If you can’t sleep or you’re sad or lonely, just come up and hop in,” Jasper said, still with her eyes shut.  “Don’t have to wake me.  Not a problem as long as you don’t pounce like… like a mongoose.”  She opened her eyes.  “Was that little pouncy animal called a mongoose or is that a bird?”

“I said I thought _you_ were sad or lonely.  Are you really awake?”

“Only half.”  There was another flash of lightning, although this time there were a few seconds’ pause before the thunder growled, and it wasn’t quite as loud.  By that time Peridot’s face was already hidden in Jasper’s chest.  She felt one large, warm hand pat her shivering back.  “You’re okay,” Jasper said.  “It’s going further away.”

“I did _not_ come up here to get comforted,” Peridot insisted, but she nestled down against Jasper’s body.  

“Oh well.  Lemme practise on you anyway.  Amethyst and Steven had to give me a whole refresher course on Touching Without Hitting.  I’m five thousand years rusty.”

“Really?” Peridot asked.  “You’re so good at it though.  Hugging and comforting.  I did think it was _strange_ that you should have that talent but you’re highly proficient.”

“I am?”

“Yes, with animals.  I mean plants.  I mean birds.”

“Like you, ya little mongoose.”  Jasper lay quietly for a few moments.  There was another flicker of lightning and a more distant roll of thunder, and she pressed gently on Peridot’s back until it was gone.  “I didn’t say I’m a beginner.  I said I’m rusty.”

“There isn’t that much iron in the Beta sandstone.  Your hair is only wavy.  Who did you use to hug?”

“My friends,” Jasper said.  Her voice was almost lost in the sound of the rain.  “My family, Amethyst calls them.  You know a few of them are still alive?”

“So I’ve heard, out at the Zoo.  I wish I could go see.  Pearl and I have got to get our heads together on building a new ship.”

“I miss them so much.  I couldn’t miss them for a long time.  I had to not care about them any more.  They were gone and there was no point in complaining or moping around.  Now I know they’re _not_ all gone forever… it hurts… it always hurts… but it doesn’t hurt as bad as not caring.”

“Well, I’ll fix it so you can go see them and then you won’t have to hurt at all any more,” Peridot said triumphantly, and then deflated.  “Well, in that area at least.”

“That’d be good,” Jasper rumbled quietly, “but it can’t be your top priority.  They’re safe and I’m safe.  We’ll keep.”

“It’s good you had someone to love.  I never had that before here.  Well, I loved Yellow Diamond, but that’s a whole different kind of thing.  It’s admiration, or worship, it’s not like…”

“I loved Pink Diamond,” Jasper said, a little testily.  

“I — of course I never knew Pink Diamond.  I’m sure she and Yellow Diamond were different.”

“No kidding,” Jasper said, with a faint bitter chuckle.  “I… don’t want to talk about that.  That okay?”

“Yes.  I don’t really like talking about my old Diamond either.”

“She’s still my Diamond.  I mean, you saw I changed back.”  It was too dark for Peridot to see it at the moment but it was true that the diamond badge on Jasper’s uniform was pink now.  She hadn’t changed her whole outfit the way the Crystal Gems liked to do when they reformed, an idea Peridot had never considered before she knew them.  She wasn’t in any hurry to get poofed again, it wasn’t a very nice experience, but she had some ideas in mind for next time, whenever that might be.  She wasn’t _sure_ she could actually change her appearance from her original form, that might be one of her Era Two limitations, so she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone just in case.  She felt a sharp little pang of sadness and sniffed.

“What’s wrong?” Jasper asked.

“I’m sorry, it’s dumb.”

“About Yellow Diamond?”

“No, I — I was thinking that if I ever changed my uniform I wouldn’t be able to show Lapis.  And I felt sad.   _That’s_ dumb, isn’t it?”

Jasper sighed.  “I think… I think you’re just missing the person you thought she was.  And that person’s someone you’d want to show your new look and she’d be interested and happy for you.  But that person wouldn’t have ditched you and taken all your stuff, would she?”

Peridot shook her head, her cheek rocking against Jasper’s arm.  “And she wouldn’t have spent months holding you at the bottom of the ocean tormenting you.  I know.”

“But you did really love her, even if she was more of an idea in your head than a real person, and you are really sad you lost her.  I don’t think that’s dumb.”

“It _feels_ dumb,” Peridot mumbled.  That was just like Yellow Diamond, she realised.  The perfectly rational and wise decider she had believed in had just been an idea of hers.  That was who she still missed.  Knowing that person didn’t exist was one more thing that made the universe seem colder and more hostile.  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

“What for this time?”

“That you have to hear about me loving her or at least my idea of her when… you know.”  She felt Jasper shrug.  “If it’s bothering you, you’ll say something, right?”  Jasper shrugged again.  Peridot poked her with a stiff forefinger.  “We should both be able to say what we think and our feelings are equally important.  Ee-qua-lee, Jasper.”

“I told you I didn’t want to talk about my Diamond.  See?  No problem.”

“What was it like?  With Lapis.”

“That’s a hell of a question.”  Jasper’s yellow eyes seemed to spark in the gloom.  

“You’ve never exactly said.  I only know what she told me about it.  I don’t know how accurate that was but I definitely don’t know how you felt about it.”

Jasper sighed heavily.  “What do you want to know for?”

“You said you’d hoped we could talk about it, but all the time you’ve been living here, well, we’ve talked a lot about what it was like for me with her and hardly any about what it was like for you.  It doesn’t feel _equitable._ If there’s something you want to be able to say but you think it’s going to upset me, I don’t want you to feel that way.  Just tell me.  If it does upset me, I’ll just — I’ll deal with it.”  Peridot  waited, listening to the rain and to Jasper’s ragged breathing.  “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,” she finished weakly.

“No, I don’t,” said Jasper, “and I especially don’t have to give up whatever’s on my mind because you’re feeling curious.”

“I’m not just curious,” Peridot said, stung.  “I want to understand so I can be some help to you.  I don’t want to be the Lapis here, just letting you look after me, so _don’t_ tell me if you don’t want to, but don’t say I’m just being _nosy.”_

She waited.  Jasper kept breathing, too loudly for someone lying at rest.  Eventually she said, “I think if I talk about it, it’ll upset _me._  I want to say what it was like but I hate even thinking about it.  But I _want_ to tell you!  But it’s just…”  She rolled onto her back beside Peridot.  “I get _so angry.”_

“Oh, I know you must be really mad at her.”

“No, at _me!_  Because I couldn’t _stop_ her!  Because I kept kidding myself that I could salvage something, that if I could just _endure_ there’d be a payoff, that — that all this was happening because I’d messed up, that I deserved all this pain and shame and the only way to redeem myself…” Jasper stopped, pressing the heels of her palms against her eyes, breathing gustily, almost sobbing.  “I know,” she said, sounding as if she had gravel grinding in her throat, “I _know_ I never stood a chance.  I _know_ she’s a monster.  I still feel all the time, _all the time,_ I failed, I was weak, I was stupid, I brought all of it on myself.”

Peridot scooted up on the mattress and awkwardly hugged Jasper’s neck, resting her cheek on top of her head.  “Don’t you go thinking all the things you tell me not to think.”

“Well, _you_ shouldn’t think them,” Jasper said, with a sound like a faint, wheezy, unhappy giggle.  She ground her palms against her eyes again.  “It was… it felt like it went on forever.  The pressure was so bad, I felt like I’d die if I couldn’t get to the surface, like if I couldn’t reach air I would crack.  I felt like I was cracking a lot of times, but then I didn’t and it would go on and I’d try to tell myself, see, you survived that because you’re tough, but it didn’t help.  The only thing that helped was that sometimes she’d get a little tired or a little distracted and she’d ease off for a while, but by the time I gathered my strength to try to take control she was back.”

She lowered her hands and took a deep breath, in and out.  “So that was painful and exhausting.  But I can do painful and exhausting, I’m a Quartz.  What else am I good for, right?  What got to me more was the things she’d say.  She could give an Agate lessons.  Worthless, useless, disgusting…”

“You’re not worthless or disgusting, you’re tall and strong and if you’d come out of any Kindergarten of mine I’d be proud of you.”  Peridot tried ineffectually to smooth back Jasper’s fluffy short hair.  

“If I have to suffer on this hideous planet forever, you’re going to suffer with me,” Jasper said, her voice almost expressionless.  “This wasn’t supposed to happen to me.  I was going home.  You’re home though, aren’t you, you filthy brute?  How dare you touch me?  Do you even know who I am?”

“Who did she say she was?” Peridot asked, surprised.  “She never told me she was anyone.  I mean, anyone else.”

“I don’t know if it was rhetorical or what,” Jasper said wearily.  “I got the impression she meant someone important, but she never _deigned_ to explain.  I guess Lapis Lazulis used to be important here, with all the terraforming they wanted to do.  She was more interested in telling me how insignificant and stupid and brutal I was and what a misery she was going to make my life.  Go ahead and scream.  No one will ever hear you.  It’s just you and me forever.  I didn’t scream,” she added with sudden urgency.  “That was one thing she couldn’t do.  And I never let her hear me cry.  I couldn’t give her the satisfaction.  She used to cry, though.”

“She did?”  Peridot was feeling sick, fighting down the urge to tell Jasper she was wrong, Lapis couldn’t have been that cruel.  Maybe the crying softened things at least a little.  

“Yeah.  I made the mistake of thinking that might mean she was lonely or something and I might get her to… warm up to me?  Like if I acted concerned about her.  But I’m a bad actor and she laughed at me.  I got so desperate.  Once I even thought, well, maybe I can seduce my way out of this, what have I got to lose?  I… slipped down a shoulder strap, I tried to act like the whole endless rage thing was really hot.  She said that was the most repulsive thing she’d ever seen.”

“Well that was just being mean for the sake of it, you’re very pretty,” Peridot mumbled.  Jasper gave a snort and a laugh, but it wasn’t a bitter one.  She reached up and ruffled Peridot’s hair with one hand.

“That’s… that’s the main points.  Just all of that, over and over.  But in the end I think it wasn’t satisfying.  I wasn’t who she really wanted to hurt, I was just convenient.  I wasn’t worried about it then because I didn’t care about him yet, but I’m sure she wanted to do something to Steven.”

“But Lapis loves Steven,” Peridot said uneasily.  

“I didn’t understand it too well at the time because I was being an obstinate moron and not grasping that Steven is really a different Gem from Rose Quartz.  I couldn’t face the idea that I was never going to get any answers out of her or get a chance to take her down and make sure she knew it.  No satisfaction for me either.  So when Lapis would mutter and hiss about Steven, I didn’t think all that deeply about it.  I was more worried about me.  What finally made her hold weak enough for me to break,” Jasper said, her voice shaking with another touch of not-really-funny laughter, “was that she got more focused on _eating watermelons that looked like him_ than on battering me.”

“I did _not_ understand how the whole watermelon thing worked,” Peridot admitted.  “I think they’re his avatars or something?  Is that a thing?  I haven’t found any other plant that behaves that way except Pumpkin.  I’m working on the hypothesis that he has dominion over all gourds.”

“I wouldn’t know an avatar from a hole in the ground,” said Jasper.  She sounded more honestly amused by that, although she followed it with a sigh.  “So that, I thought, was my big break.  I got control, I could _move,_ and I thought I finally, _finally_ had my way to win her over, that there was someone she hated more than me.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.  Together we’d be unbeatable.  The best I could say about that is that it was working for a while there.  But we got split up, knocked out, and she got taken in by the Crystal Gems, and I slid off down a hole because that was just the kind of day I was having, I guess.  Life kicks Jasper in the guts.  Again.”

“You were better off though, right?  You didn’t have to suffer chained to Lapis.”

“I was still chained up,” Jasper muttered.  “Like I said, obstinate moron.  I was still thinking, I’m gonna salvage this!  I know what to say now, I know what she wants, we want the same thing really!  It can all be okay, we can still win.  I was desperate.  I went back to the ocean because I figured that was the best place to find her.  When I finally saw her again, I was so excited!  I went on my knees in front of her and begged her for another chance.  I’d have said anything.  It was pathetic.  You probably know what happened, right?  She decided she was a _nice little person_ now and acted all scared of me?”

“I heard some of it,” Peridot said.  “She really was scared.”

“Scared, my big stripey ass.  She knew she could do anything she wanted to me and I couldn’t stop her.  You didn’t buy that, did you?”

“No, I’m not making excuses for her, I mean she _was_ scared, just not of you.  She was scared of herself and what she’d done and how bad it had got.”

Jasper was quiet for a few moments.  “Not scared enough,” she said.  “I don’t want to talk about this any more.  It’s just getting me mad again.  There are times when I think, oh I don’t really hate her, I pity her, there’s something really wrong with her, but then I think some more and I hate her so much.  And I don’t — _want…”_  She balled up her fists and thumped them down on the mattress.  “I don’t want to get all obsessed with someone again, because it makes me stupid.  I want to not even care about her any more.  Don’t you?  Wouldn’t it be great if you went all day and didn’t even remember her?  If you heard her name and you didn’t feel cold or sick or mad?”

“Yeah,” Peridot said, nodding so that her cheek brushed Jasper’s hair.  “Yeah, that would be good.”  

Jasper took a long, deep breath in and then slowly let it out.  “One day,” she said.  “Okay.  I’m glad I told you.  You don’t have to wonder and I don’t have to hold it in.  You get why I don’t want to dwell on it though, right?  Why I hate thinking about what a fool I was?”  Before Peridot could answer she rushed on, “My old Agate once told me, she wouldn’t always be there to crack the whip but if she’d trained me right, my mind would be my own whip.  And I guess it is.  And it was my own chains too, when Lapis wasn’t there any more.  So I honestly don’t know how much of how I am is what she did to me and how much I did to myself.  Does that make sense?”

“Mmhm,” Peridot said, uncertain.  

“Steven and Amethyst keep on saying _none_ of it was your fault, Jasper, you didn’t deserve _any_ of that, it’s not your responsibility, and I know they’re trying to be kind but I just don’t believe them.  Both of them have always lived here.  They’re only Gems in their bodies, you know?  They’ve got the instincts but not the training.  It sounds like Rose Quartz was trying on purpose to see what you get if you don’t raise a Quartz like a Quartz.  So how could they know?”

“I don’t know, but Steven always seems to know what he’s talking about with feelings.  I think you should trust him.”

“Steven trusted Lapis and thought everything was hunky-dory with you two up at the barn.  I’m just saying he can get things wrong.  He can be too kind.”

“Am _I_ being too kind?” Peridot asked.  

“Oh no.  I mean, you know what’s up.  You’re from Homeworld.  I guess I don’t think you’d be nice to me if I didn’t deserve it.”

Peridot felt she should argue with that but didn’t know where to begin.  

“I’m going back to sleep,” Jasper said.  “You can stay.  Thanks.”  She rolled back towards Peridot again, curling up on her side, as if that was that.  She must be tired; big feelings, in Peridot’s experience, could be draining and Jasper’s must be bigger than most.  She tried to lie quietly and let her rest.  The rainstorm seemed to be over now, it had tapered off while they were talking, but the wind still moaned outside.  

She couldn’t stop thinking about the day Lapis had come home from her boat ride with Steven and Greg, how cheerful she’d been at first, as if a weight had slipped from her back, and how over the course of the evening that had deteriorated into furious weeping and self-castigation.  It had been all Peridot could do to get her calmed down, and of course she’d assured her again and again that what had happened wasn’t her fault.  Finally Lapis had worn herself out and had settled down to rest in Peridot’s arms, lying in her hammock, gently rocking.  Peridot had stroked her hair and felt that tremendous sense of relief and wellbeing that came with Lapis not being angry or upset any more, the great sense of worth that came from being the kind friend who had accomplished that, who understood feelings and knew how to care.  

She could imagine how Jasper had been feeling that night, alone, lost, rejected, desperate for something that would make sense and restore her purpose.  There had been no one for her.  It wasn’t a simple thing like thinking she should have been there for Jasper instead of Lapis; Lapis _had_ really needed someone and Jasper hadn’t made it easy for anyone to help her.  Maybe it _would_ have been better if Pearl had managed to stop Jasper falling way back when.  Jasper could have stayed at the temple, they could have kept her and Lapis apart until things had settled down… well, that was all moot now.

Better late than never, right?  She _could_ be here for Jasper now, could have that warm, glowing satisfaction of knowing she’d helped.

 

Jasper woke again because her face was getting wet, and her face was getting wet because Peridot was crying over her.  She did not know how to do it quietly; she was sniffing and hiccupping and sucking in her lower lip with an unfortunate slurping sound.

“What’s wrong?”  Jasper was beginning to get really irritated.  She was a lot slower to anger these days but getting woken twice in one night for Emotions with a capital E felt like too much.  She’d been looking forward to a solid eight to ten hours of peaceful nothing.  

“I’m such a selfish friend!” Peridot wailed.

“What?  What’s going _on?”_ Jasper sat up, scratching the back of her head where she still expected to find thick waves of hair.  Every time she touched her head it felt weird and wrong, but she’d committed to the whole short-hair-fresh-start thing.  Steven had got all starry-eyed and said she was like a cool ronin now, whatever that meant.

“I was wuh-watching you sleep and thinking and I ruh-realised I only take care of people because it makes me feel like a good person!” Peridot wailed.  “It’s completely self-serving!”

“Stars _above,_ Peridot, you’re not being a selfish friend, you’re being a _weird_ friend.  How do you even figure that out?”

“I’m just being nice to you because I feel good when I see you’re happier!  It’s not for you at all!  I did the same thing with Lapis!”  Her little monkey face was all contorted with tears.

Jasper stared at her incredulously.  “Yeah, you’re right.  Being nice to people only counts if you hate every second.  You selfish jerk.”

“Don’t make fun of me!” Peridot said, and punched her in the arm, which didn’t even hurt.

“Wow, you must really _despise_ Steven, huh?  Most selfish person in the world by your new measure.”

“That’s different!  Steven is genuinely altruistic!” Peridot cried, waving her arms and gnashing her teeth in her agitation.

“You’re not getting the sarcasm, are you?”  Jasper shoved her hands under Peridot’s arms and lifted her up so they were nose to nose.  Since Peridot’s nose was currently running heavily, it wasn’t a great experience but she thought the eye contact would help.  There were tears all dammed up along the bottom edge of Peridot’s visor; if she cried much more she would be able to keep a tiny fish in there.  “Homeworld to Peridot.  Now hear this.  Feeling good when you see you’ve made someone else happier _is a sign you’re a nice person._  Can you just take that from a recovering nasty person?  Because I know how the opposite works.  It’s like takes one to know one, but backwards.”

Peridot hiccupped and gave a big rattling sniff.  “But I was so proud of myself.  I thought I was such a big deal,” she said forlornly.  “And I just thought while you were sleeping, what if _this_ is why things went bad with Lapis?  Because I was only trying to help her for myself?  I wuh-was selfish and nuh-not a real friend?”  She was looking ready to start sobbing again and Jasper realised she had to act fast to head that off.  She bundled Peridot into her arms and hugged her close to her chest.  Peridot squeaked faintly and subsided.

“Lapis really had you whipped,” Jasper grumbled, “and you’re still whipping yourself.  If you go on looking for a reason why it was all your fault, what are you going to do when you find it?”

“Feel really really bad about it?” Peridot suggested, muffled.

“What then?”

“Probably nothing because everything is pointless?”

“You don’t really think that.  What about your garden?  What about the weird stuff you’re always building and inventing?  What about Amethyst?  Would you be doing any of that if it was all pointless?”

Peridot sniffed again.  Jasper could feel her tears leaking against her chest, but she wasn’t sobbing.  “Probably not.”

“There you go.”  Jasper rubbed her skinny little back.  “You just got all worked up alone in the dark and forgot about that.  In the morning you’re going to see the sunshine and you’ll feel different.  Maybe not all better, but not like this.  I’ve got a strong gut feeling about that.”

“What if it’s not sunny?” Peridot asked, always probing for logical flaws.

“I’ll turn on that gloopy lamp you got me.  Or we’ll go down to the temple and warp somewhere the sun _is_ shining.”

“That does sound reasonable.”  Peridot pushed back from Jasper’s chest a bit, just far enough to tip up her visor and wipe her wet cheeks with the back of her hand.  “I guess that will help.”

“And you know what?”

“What?”

“I’ll be a selfish jerk and feel really good when I see you feeling better.  Now go back to sleep, mongoose.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I stayed up too late finishing this and if I were smart I'd sit on it another day to reread the chapter but I'm not that smart.
> 
> My favourite part of this whole chapter is when the seagull flies off and Jasper sees Peridot is sad and snaps into Quartz Problem-Solving Mode.
> 
> That and my mental image of Jasper lying on her back on the couch and Peridot lying on her tummy on Jasper's front and both of them watching David Attenborough talk about carnivorous plants with absolute fascination.


	3. Chapter 3

The garden was coming along nicely.  Peridot had had her doubts about the shift from agriculture to horticulture, though it was hard to explain them clearly.  Okay, so making the Kindergarten bloom hadn’t worked, but that was clearly a problem of location.  Growing crops made her miss Lapis too much for her to carry on with that but she still felt a hankering to grow _something;_ she seemed to have got a taste for it and not working with anything green and growing seemed to mean she dwelt on sad thoughts more and spent entirely too much time listening to Patsy Cline.  

Maybe it was just the sense of upheaval, of being _transplanted_ yet again, wondering whether she was really doing the right thing now that she had so many choices of what to do.  The doubts had been misplaced, clearly, because the plants were thriving, both the hardier ones she had chosen for outside and the wussier varieties she was cultivating indoors.  Once again her talents had risen to the challenge.  

She had now built a hydroponic system that lined the inner walls of her big downstairs room and hung lamps that provided the warmth and light the plants needed; she had orchids doing very nicely and an assortment of sundews and other carnivorous plants that Jasper thought were neat.  She would crawl around out in the garden catching bugs to feed to them, which Peridot felt was a little bloodthirsty of her, but the plants seemed to appreciate it.  They had agreed not to tell Steven about the bugs.  Lying on the couch together having a peaceful evening of TV amid the greenery was very pleasant.  

They were still working on finding the replacement for _Camp Pining Hearts._ It was such a tough act to follow.  Peridot had made an extensive chart showing her analysis of the enjoyable and compelling aspects of the show, and a few of the undesirable elements she’d like to avoid, as a guide to what to look for in a successor.  Jasper did her best to help, mostly by asking for recommendations from Jenny and Sadie, two adolescent humans who she had met in town and who wanted to take her to concerts and sit on her shoulders.  

What they’d learned from that was that a) vampires grossed both of them out, b) werewolves gave Jasper a very upsetting flashback about involuntary physical transformation that kept them both up all night and were definitely off the menu henceforth, and c) zombies were a bit overrated and should stick to fighting with plants on Peridot’s tablet.  Clones were pretty good, they’d watch more about the clones, and the thing about the missing little boy and the monster was enjoyable.  

At first the show about the space-station teens dropped to an irradiated Earth seemed like a strong contender and Peridot was enchanted.  Jasper complained about how wriggly with enthusiasm she got while watching it and asked whether she needed to be hog-tied to stop her kicking Jasper’s knees, but this was apparently said in good humour.  Unfortunately, the grimness and stabbiness of the whole thing as it continued put her off.  She ceased to wriggle after a few episodes and they agreed to keep looking and watched something intriguingly icky about slime mould in the meantime.  

“We have a pretty good life here, wouldn’t you say?” she asked Jasper one sunny afternoon when they were weeding around the sunflowers and marigolds.  

Jasper gave her an odd look from under her brows.  She was carefully plucking up tiny weedlings that looked miniature between her big fingers.  “As good as I’ve ever had,” she said.  

“Yes, I take good care of you, don’t I?”

“What, like you’re in charge of me?” Jasper asked.  “You’re my supervisor or something?”

“Well, no, obviously we’re roommates.  Which is a strange term since we each have a room to ourselves, but welcome to Earth, am I right?”  She gave a scoffing chuckle.  

“You’re in my room most nights,” Jasper pointed out.  “Not that I mind, but I think it’s more like we have a bedroom and a living room.  And if I wanted to introduce you to someone I wouldn’t say ‘This is Peridot, she takes care of me.’  I’d say ‘This is Peridot, we live together’ or something.”

“Not ‘She’s my best friend’?” Peridot asked, a touch crestfallen.

“You’re best friends with Amethyst,” Jasper said.  “There’s only one best.  That’s what best means.”

“Nuh-uh, I’m Steven’s best friend too.  I can be lots of different people’s best friend.  I am nothing if not versatile.”

Jasper frowned.  “I thought being best friends was mutual.  So it’s one to one.”

“Oh Jasper, so naïve about these things!  It’s not your fault, you’ve had a hard-bitten life of perpetual conflict with no time for friendship.  This is part of what I mean about taking care of you!”

Now Jasper seemed to be looking at her askance.  Peridot was fairly sure that was what askance was.  “So if you’re a bunch of people’s best friend, who’s _your_ best friend?”

“Well, not Lapis, right?  Haaaa.  Can you stop askancing at me?”

“You just pulled up a marigold,” Jasper pointed out.

“I wanted to move it two centimetres to the left!” Peridot snapped, grabbing her trowel.  

“If you do have a best friend you should be able to answer that,” Jasper said, dusting earth off her hands.  

“I don’t know, all right?  You’re important.  Amethyst is amazing.  Steven is _Steven._  It seems unkind to try to rank you.”

“Did you feel like she _was_ your best friend?” Jasper asked quietly.  

“I… don’t know.  I wanted to.  But I also wanted it to be Amethyst.  But then that’s complicated because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I try to be discreet about it, but I have a little bit of a crush on Amethyst.”

Jasper stared at her for a moment and then sat back on her heels and guffawed.  Jasper had a _huge_ laugh when she was really amused, it made window glass buzz if she did it indoors and birds fly out of trees if she was outside.  Her whole body shook with it and it was pointless to expect her to stop before she’d laughed herself down to raucous, weepy-eyed wheezes that Amethyst called her Muttley laugh.  Peridot had been proud to get a laugh like that out of her when she’d told her a chicken joke of her own invention, but less so now.  She sat with her arms folded and glared until Jasper seemed to be done.

“Sorry,” said Jasper, wiping her eyes and hiccuping, “that was mean… but you thought I didn’t _know?_ That crush is visible from space!”

“At least I don’t _sigh_ about her like you do over Pearl!  This is you!”  Peridot drew in a breath till it inflated her chest to its limit and then let it out with a vast, morose “hhhhhaaaaaaaahhhhhh” that fluttered the marigolds.

“That’s different!” Jasper protested.  “You have a shot with Amethyst!  Pearl just feels sorry for me.  And _that’s_ only because she’s such a good person.”

“That’s just defeatist talk,” said Peridot.  “She could like you back.  Stranger things have happened.”

“Oh yeah,” Jasper grumbled, scratching one of the blue-green patches on her arm, “because my creeping crud is _so_ attractive.”

“I don’t think Pearl would be that picky,” said Peridot, shrugging, “and speaking of picking you asked me to remind you when you are.”

“Oh.”  Jasper smoothed her palm over the spot she had been worrying at as if apologising to it before moving her hand away.  “Thanks.”

“Are you going to tell her you like her, like _like_ her like her?” Peridot asked eagerly.

“Come on,” Jasper said.  “She doesn’t need a mess like me.  Also she’s got Garnet, hasn’t she?”

“If _those_ two are an item Garnet shouldn’t flirt with _me_ so much.”

“I cannot read her at _all,”_ Jasper said, turning back to the weeding.  “How do you even know she’s flirting?”

“She only asked me to _fuse_ with her.  Like, recreationally.  You know Garnet!”

“I don’t really,” Jasper said, stolidly plucking up errant sprouts of green.  “I’ll try to get along with her for the rest of your sakes, but I don’t actually _like_ Garnet.  I _can’t_ like someone who’s all happy and self-satisfied and sufficient like that.  And I don’t care if that sounds mean or envious, it’s just how I feel.  I don’t relate to her on any level.”

“But… she did help me a lot…” Peridot said hesitantly.

“I don’t care if _you_ like her.  I mean, I don’t _mind_ if you like her.  You don’t have to not like her out of sympathy, she’s just nothing to do with me.”

“Just… I mean… sometimes Lapis would say that we didn’t need to be friends with the Crystal Gems, we only really needed each other.  And Steven.  She made an exception for Steven.  But I didn’t really ever go visit them unless there was a special reason, because I knew she didn’t like it, she didn’t like _them._  So when you’re saying _this,_ it reminds me of _that.”_

Jasper glanced at her from under her own arm as she worked.  “I just finished telling you it’s not like that.  Garnet’s the only one I’ve got a problem with and I don’t want to stop anyone else seeing her, I just stay out of her way.  It’s okay.  I didn’t even mean to talk about it this much, it is _not_ a big thing.  Hey, changing the subject, what was it like?”

“What was what like?” Peridot asked, derailed.  

“Fusing.  Wasn’t it _weird_ with two other people already there?  How did you fit in?  Were you just sort of riding along?”

“Oh!  Oh, no, I think I gave you the wrong impression.  She _asked_ me to.  We didn’t _actually._  I mean, we started to try to, but then I wanted to stop, so she let me.  It hasn’t ever come up again.”  Presumably Garnet had taken her “no” back then as a “no forever,” and while Peridot appreciated her respecting her choice and all that, she felt a little let down sometimes that Garnet didn’t seem to think she had missed out on anything.  She spun the handle of her trowel between her palms.  “Can I tell you something?  In confidence?”

“Uh-huh.”  Jasper straightened back up and looked at her.  “Shoot.”

“I, uh, I didn’t tell her to stop because I was nervous or I didn’t feel ready to go that far.  I was just afraid it wouldn’t _work._  And she would know.  And she’d feel sorry for me or she’d look down on me, you know.  There _are_ great things I can do but then there are things that just… I’m an Era Two Gem.  The only one here.  I can’t shapeshift, so how could I merge my form with another Gem’s?  I didn’t want to just end up feeling more defective.”  Peridot poked the point of the trowel into the grass and twiddled it around.  Staring at it made it easier to say those things to Jasper’s face because it wasn’t exactly _to_ her face.  A shadow fell across her and she felt a large, warm hand on her back.  Jasper shuffled on her butt alongside her, peering down at her.  

“You’re not the only one,” she said.  “I mean, I’m Era One and I started off good, but I _am_ defective now and I don’t think I can fuse again.  Well, don’t think I _should._  You can imagine why.”  

As long as she was getting things off her chest, Peridot took a deep breath and said in a rush, “I asked Lapis to try fusing with me once, I thought I wouldn’t be too embarrassed if it didn’t work with her, but that hurt her feelings so much, she said she couldn’t imagine how I could be that insensitive and thoughtless, after what she had gone through, and if I didn’t care about her feelings she’d just have to take something I did care about, and she tore up my master shipping chart.”

A low rumble came from Jasper’s throat.  “I know I can’t really do anything to her,” she said, “but whenever you tell me about her pulling crap like that I want to tell you that if I see her again I’ll punch her once for me and twice for you.”

“It _was_ a pretty insensitive thing to ask.  After what happened.  Later on she said she was sorry and she couldn’t ever fuse with me because she wanted to protect me, she didn’t want to hurt me the way she’d done to you.”

“Could’ve said that instead of tearing up your shippy thing,” Jasper pointed out.  

“Yeah, I guess so.  She helped me redraw it.”

“Still could’ve not torn it up in the first place.  And that wasn’t the last time she did something like that, was it?”

“No,” Peridot admitted.  “I just — I wanted to give you the whole picture.”  She took another deep breath and leaned her head on Jasper’s arm.  “And you’re not _defective,_ you have minor discolouration, it’s _cosmetic._  Take it from a professional.  You’re still a truly impressive specimen.”

Jasper snorted, but didn’t look displeased.  “You’re good enough the way you are, you know.  You’re smart and resourceful and you’re a tough little mongoose.”  She sat still a little while, circling her palm slowly on Peridot’s back.  Then she asked, “You really think that?  Like, as your professional opinion?”

“What, that you’re impressive?  No duh.”

“No, that it’s only minor, cosmetic.  That it’s not… rotten.”  Her voice caught a little bit on the last word and Peridot tilted her head to see her face better.  She was stony-faced, frowning only slightly.  

“Well, I admit I had some misgivings at first about whether it had really affected your integrity, but I’ve kept you under observation and you seem as stable as ever.  No, _more_ stable, you’re not as volatile as you used to be.  Your strength and co-ordination aren’t affected, your colouring and the length of your hair are the only features that really look different, and you seem a little _sharper_ mentally, to be honest.  I know it was a really hard experience for you and it’s left a mark, but you shouldn’t worry about _rot._ Gosh.”

“So you don’t think it could spread?  I mean, get passed to someone else?” Jasper asked, her hand slowing down.

“If it was catching I’m sure _I_ would have caught it by now.”

“I caught it in a fusion,” Jasper mumbled, looking away.  

“Here’s the thing,” Peridot said, getting to her feet and walking around Jasper as the most convenient way of getting back into her line of sight.  “I think you got it from a fusion but not the fusion you think.  Of course research into cross-Gem fusion is stalled in its primitive stages and took a deeply regrettable turn into actual mad science, _but_ I’m always observing and thinking, and here’s what I observed and what I think.   _This_ colour,” she said, touching the blue-green streak on Jasper’s shoulder, “was not on the corrupted Gem you fused with.  It’s a _similar_ colour but not the same, and it didn’t appear at all on the fusion you formed together.  I don’t think it comes from her.  I never saw Malachite in person but I’ve seen samples of _malachite_ and let me tell you, those are malachitey colours.  And although I don’t know how it could be tested to prove or disprove it, so I feel dumb even _saying_ it, I have a strong feeling that you wouldn’t even have been corrupted if the experience as Malachite hadn’t sort of destabilised you _mentally_ .  Like, I’m sure combining your mind with a corrupted Gem’s didn’t _help_ you any, but if you weren’t already hurting from that it might not have tipped you over, and _that’s_ why your corrupted form had Malachite’s colours.  So this isn’t like an _infection,”_ she said, tapping the mark again, “it’s more like a scar.  Which of course isn’t contagious.”  

Peridot paused expectantly.  Jasper stared at the grass in front of her, her jaw working slightly.  She said nothing.

“Wow, thanks for that perspective, Peridot!  I sure do appreciate the thought you’ve given to my problem.  Even if you don’t have all the answers it’s good to know you care.  Any time.  Put it in your own words.”  Peridot stood back and folded her arms.

Jasper looked at her from under her eyebrows, creased together in thought.  Her eyes looked… shiny?  Not quite teary but definitely wetter than usual.  “Is that what you really think?  You’re not just trying to tell me what I’d want to hear?” she asked.

“I’m really trying _not_ to do that.  And it’s easier with you.  It’s not that I don’t _care_ what you think but I don’t _worry_ what you think the same way.  Yes.  I think that’s the distinction.”

Jasper was silent a minute more, as if she were chewing that over.  “Well,” she said at last, “would you feel safe enough trying with me?”

“Trying what?  Oh!  Trying fusion?  But if I _can’t_ that can’t be very satisfying for you.”

“Well, also if you can’t, it should be safe for you.  It’s only if you _can_ that I’d be asking you to take any risk, I guess.”  Jasper shrugged one shoulder.  “I suppose the trade-off is whether you’d think finding out you _could_ would be worth the risk of getting corrupted.  I know I’m not offering you a great deal here, I’m not gonna be offended if you say no.”

“No!  I mean yes.  I mean let’s try it.”

“Are you really sure?” Jasper asked.

“You’re the one suggesting it!” Peridot protested.

“Sure, but I don’t want to be pushy again.  We — we probably shouldn’t, I shouldn’t be putting all this on you.”  Jasper pushed herself to her feet, dusting off her knees and butt.

“Of course you know who thinks fusion is just terrific.  Other than Garnet,” Peridot said, feeling tremendously sly.  “It rhymes with ‘twirl.’”

“Shut it, Peridot,” said Jasper in a tone of weary forbearance.  

“Why Jasper, of course I’d like to fuse with you!  Thank you for asking so _chivalrously.”_ Peridot attempted her best imitation of Pearl’s voice, which even she knew was not very convincing.

“Just because you’re shorter than me and we’re friends doesn’t mean I won’t punt you.”

“It actually does.  Hah!  Called your bluff.  C’mon, let’s do this.  Oh wait!  Let me get my stilts.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be continuing I guess?


	4. Chapter 4

“What are  _ stilts?” _ Jasper asked dubiously as Peridot came clanking out of the lighthouse with what looked like paint cans strapped to her feet.  

“A primitive approximation of limb enhancers.  But they’ll facilitate our fusion dance by reducing our height differential.  Right?”  She looked pretty proud of herself.  

“They’ve got flames on them,” Jasper noted, crouching down to see them better.  She raised her eyebrows.  “Cool.”

“Heh-heh.  A little token of Steven’s esteem.”  Peridot lifted one foot for her to further admire.  

“You really don’t mind, do you?  Being smaller.”  Jasper still didn’t find that easy to understand, but she was gradually getting to accept that it was so.  She’d spent so long thinking of small stature as a kind of unfortunate disability, something to be pitied and if possible compensated for, that it was a hard habit to break.  Seeing Peridot on stilts reminded her how it had come to seem  _ normal  _ to see her pattering around in her stocking feet.

“Oh, I minded  _ big time. _  I just had to get used to it.  I do  _ really _ miss a lot of their functionality.  They were so versatile!  But I think learning to cope without them has made  _ me _ more versatile.  Like you said, I’m resourceful!”  Peridot strutted in a little circle, her chest puffed out.

“So I guess we’re doing this,” Jasper said.  She was in a state she couldn’t quite name to herself, wanting this so much, wanting it to  _ work, _ but full of dread, almost a conviction that it wouldn’t, it couldn’t.  Even if it would make Peridot feel bad she partly hoped that she  _ would _ be incapable of fusion, so she’d be safe and she, Jasper, wouldn’t have to find out if she was contaminated in a way that would cut her off from the possibility of it forever.  That was cowardly, she realised.  She wanted Peridot to lose her hope so she wouldn’t have to lose her own.  She pushed herself back to her feet, pushing the doubt and dread down.  “Out here?”

“Well, there’s something to be said for privacy, but I don’t know how big we might get.  We might not  _ fit _ inside the lighthouse.  I think we need to be outdoors just for safety.”  Peridot’s stilts-induced cockiness was fading and she was beginning to look nervous.  “You know how to do this, right?  I mean, you had training.  Right?”

“Basic,” Jasper agreed.  “I know it was different for you being in tech.  You weren’t expected ever to need it.  We were… it was strange, kind of a double standard.  It was presented as an emergency option, something you needed to know how to do if the situation called for it, but at the same time… it’d be a disgrace.  To resort to it.  Especially for me, because I was supposed to be exceptional.  Truly strong Gems aren’t supposed to need that kind of thing.  But yeah, I trained with other Jaspers.  Lapis was just my first cross-gem fusion.  And Malachite came out way bigger than a double Jasper, so you’re right, there’s no predicting how big our fusion could be.”  She remembered the metronome, no music, the Agate pacing to correct their form, and shrugged her shoulders, shaking the thought off.  

“Okay, so, um, I’ll let you lead, shall I?”  Peridot held out her hands and Jasper reached out to take them.  She paused, looking at Peridot’s little green hands resting in her broad orange palms.  Such a mismatch.  She remembered the hands of other Jaspers long ago that had felt just like her own, and she remembered Lapis’ cold, thin fingers that gripped so tight, and she wondered about Pearl’s cool, pale hands that had only ever brushed her in passing.  Peridot’s hands were warm and a little sweaty, confirming she was nervous, but she was was looking up at her trustingly with that cute little monkey face and that made it more difficult somehow.  

“Uh… let’s wait for nightfall.  When it’s dark we won’t be so obvious.  Okay?”

“Oh,” said Peridot, looking a little disappointed.  “I guess you’re right.  I was all psyched up.  Got my stilts on and everything.”

“I know.  I’m sorry.”

“Ya big tease,” Peridot said with an uneasy smile.  “Okay, well, I’ll make good use of the time, I’ll finish up this weeding and I’ll pick out some fusion-conducive music for us.”

“No country music,” Jasper said reflexively.  She did not approve of Peridot’s mopey twangy playlist.

“Well, it’s not going to be metal.”

“But you love metal.  Huh?”

“I’m not sure about you doing puns,” said Peridot, narrowing her eyes.  “How do you feel about techno?”

“If it’s got a beat, I can dance to it.  But right now I’m going for a walk.  Need to… clear my head.”  She released Peridot’s hands and walked away.  

By the time she returned to the lighthouse the sky was a dark slate blue, pricked with the first few silver stars.  She’d walked far inland, made her way for the first time to where Peridot and Lapis had lived, looked at the overgrown fields of pumpkin and corn and the ragged conical pit where Lapis had seen fit to uproot the home Peridot had shared with her.  There was no feeling of Lapis there at all, which had been strange.  Her cold, stubborn anger had torn that hole, after all, but she’d left no other trace.  Jasper had ended up shuffling around for a while before realising she’d hit an anticlimax and turning back home.

It struck her as she made her way down to the road that she had thought “go home” and meant a place that she didn’t associate with fighting or grief or pain.  On the contrary, a place associated with comfort and affection and peace.  That shook her up at first, and then made her want to go find the warp pad for this place and get home quicker, but she felt self-conscious about just popping up in Steven’s house (Garnet might be there) (or Pearl might be there) and she still hadn’t walked off her weird mood so she kept going.  

She hadn’t been walking along the roadside for long when she heard an engine coming up behind her and debated stepping off to one side, into the shadow of the trees; humans unfamiliar with Gems tended to deal with seeing her either by  _ not _ quite seeing her despite her being eight feet tall and orange, because she didn’t fit into their conceptual continuity, or by gibbering.  Although she didn’t have much natural affection for her fellow Earthlings, she didn’t want to make one of them drive into a ditch in a fit of gibbering.  While she hesitated, she heard a horn beep.  She turned, squinted against the headlights and saw Jenny Pizza driving up in her greasy-smelling car.  

“Hey, Jasper,” Jenny called out, pulling in alongside her.  “Give you a ride back into town?”

“Is there room?” Jasper asked doubtfully, looking into the interior of the car.  She’d never been in it before and had assumed it couldn’t contain her.  When Jenny and Sadie had talked about going to concerts together in the summer she’d sort of assumed she would jog alongside.  

“Yeah, look, we just lay back the front seat, you sit your butt in the back and stick your legs along there.  Kick those boxes onto the floor, they’re garbage.”

Jasper clambered in, feeling the rear axle dip under her weight, but the car seemed to cope.  It was sturdier than it looked.  

“What brings ya out this way?” Jenny asked, taking the parking brake off.

“Walking,” Jasper said.  “Thinking.  It’s a thinking walk.”

“Deep.  I was delivering pizzas.  Hey, listen to this,” Jenny said, passing her phone back to her.  “New demo I just made with Sadie.”

“Oh!”  Jasper touched the play button on the screen, very carefully with the tip of her pinkie.  Practice with Peridot’s tablet had proven that touchscreens and her big fingers did not work well together.  She heard a guitar, sharp electrical notes, and after a few moments, Sadie’s voice weaving a spell in between them.  She listened as the road unfolded beneath them and the breeze ruffled her hair.  “She sounds great.”

“I know, right?  Sadie’s one of those people it just makes  _ no _ sense she doesn’t know how cool she is.  Although you know?  I have a theory?  She spent like however many years exclusively hanging out with Lars and it sounds like the guy was... a...  _ sinkhole.   _ Like he just drained her with his endless needy  _ suck.” _

Jasper frowned.  “Isn’t Lars her really good friend who’s lost in space?”  She was still working out who everyone around here was and it didn’t help if they weren’t  _ around. _

“Well, he’s lost in space.  I’ll give him that.”  Jenny puffed out her cheeks and blew a short, crisp raspberry.  “Ugh, I don’t want anything  _ bad _ to happen to him, I want him to get home safe and everything.  I can’t really  _ say _ anything to Sadie ‘cuz he  _ is _ lost in space, but the more I hear about him the more I want her to get  _ over _ his ass.  What would  _ you _ say to a friend about a guy who used her emotionally and never gave back, took advantage of her being kind of a pushover at work, stood her up when they had plans and oh yeah, left her for dead in the clutches of a giant yellow chick on a UFO while he ran to save his own oily skin?”

“I would say come join my society, we don’t have guys,” Jasper said, deadpan, and grinned to herself when Jenny snorted with laughter.  “Though to be fair we do have people who will use you and never give back, and all the rest of that.”

“I feel like maybe  _ I’m _ being unfair because I never did know Lars that well, but then I’m hearing about him from his number one fan and he  _ still _ sounds like a jerk,” Jenny said, and shook her head.  “So my secret sneaky plan is, I work on her self-esteem till when he comes back, she’s like okay, glad you’re alive, never needed ya, be seeing ya.”

“There’s someone I hope I can say that to if I ever see her again,” Jasper admitted.  “Although honestly I don’t know if I’d stick around to say that much.”

“What you say then is ‘Bye, Felicia.’  Then walk away.”  

“Her name is Lapis.”

“Felicia is anyone you have no time for.  She should be gone already, you’re just reminding her.”  Jenny waved one hand dismissively.

“She is gone.  Currently.  As far as I know she’s in space.”

“Ohmygosh, she and Lars should hook up,” Jenny snickered.  

“No matter how much of a sinkhole he is, he doesn’t deserve  _ that.   _ Took me long enough to see  _ I _ didn’t deserve that.”

Jenny glanced back at her, her expression a little more serious.  “Hey, I’m glad you ditched her.”

“She dumped  _ me. _  I’m better off, but I spent a while being desperate and crazy and making things worse before I could see that.”

Jenny held her hand back over her shoulder.  “Phone?”  Jasper passed it to her.  “Okay,” Jenny said, thumbing at the screen as she drove one-handed, “I am so not a disco girl but this is an old-school break-up song for the ages.  Dedicated to you.”

A voice rang out from the speaker.   _ At first I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without you by my side… _  Jasper listened skeptically at first but began to tap her fingers in time.  When it got to the verse about  _ now you’re back from outer space _ they both began to laugh so hard Jenny almost ran the red light re-entering Beach City.

Jenny dropped her at the bottom of the hill and she began to walk up to home, knowing now that this  _ was _ home.  The lights in the windows were welcoming her back.  The door stood ajar, spilling warm light into the cool night, and as she approached Pumpkin came scampering out and danced around her ankles yelping happily.

“Hi, you little freak of nature,” Jasper muttered, reaching down to scoop her up.  “Did she find some pretty bad music?”  

“She found  _ excellent _ music,” said Peridot, poking her head out of the door.  “What kept you?  You were gone for ages.”

“I ran into a friend.”

Peridot sniffed.  “Was it the pizza girl?  You smell like garlic and cheese.”  

“I don’t know what it is about Jenny.  She really reminds me of Amethyst sometimes.  You’d probably like her.”

“I only need one Amethyst, but I’m amenable to liking her on her own account,” Peridot said.  

“Hey.”  Jasper set Pumpkin down, picked up Peridot, straightened up and hugged her tight against her chest.  “I’m glad I get to come home to you.”

“What brought this on?” Peridot asked, her feet dangling as she hooked her hands behind Jasper’s neck.  “I’m not complaining.”

“I just had kind of a realisation.  Thinking walks can do that.  Even if it’s not what I thought I was thinking about.”  

“If anyone had told me when I met you that we’d one day be this affectionate I’d have thought they were completely insane.”

“Oh, same.”

“So are we going to try to fuse or are you just locked into cuddle mode for the night?”

“I thought this was a good start.  So what music did you pick?”  She set Peridot down, wondering if she’d overdone things, but Peridot looked kind of flushed and chirpy.

“We-ell, I found a lot of different  _ good _ music, but I may have psyched myself out a little trying to find something that seemed to fit both you  _ and _ me, so because I failed at specificity I decided to just go super generic but do you  _ know _ how many different  _ dancing songs _ and  _ songs about dancing _ there are on this planet?  There is literally one called ‘Land of 1000 Dances.’  Even the longest version only mentions sixteen dances!  Two of which are called the Bop and the Slop!  What do these people think they’re  _ doing?” _

“Peridot, you’re spiralling.”

“I know!” Peridot threw her hands in the air.  “I would’ve just gone down to the Temple to ask for recommendations but I didn’t want to say what it was for.  Same problem with appealing to my legion of Twitter followers.  Steven follows me too, obviously.”

“Because otherwise you’d tell all the twits what we’re getting up to?”

“Maybe!  You’re supposed to share about your life.  They know about you!  I got a  _ lot _ of likes on that cute photo I took of you sleeping with Pumpkin curled up on your chest.  I called it Two Pumpkins.”

Jasper blinked.  “You took a picture of me when I was asleep?”

“Because Pumpkin was on you.  It was adorable!  Don’t worry, you looked really pretty.  Everyone said so.”

Jasper took a deep breath, trying to fight down a surge of baffled irritation.  She’d just been feeling so good about Peridot and their home and she suspected she was being vain and insecure worrying about whether a bunch of humans saw a picture of her fast asleep with her hair all rumpled and no control over her expression (had her mouth been hanging open? please no) but she was going to have to insist on prior approval of any future portraits.  “So what  _ song _ did you pick?”

“I was paralysed by choice and picked nothing,” Peridot said quickly.  “Sorry.”

“Well… that really doesn’t matter.  I know  _ you _ wanted to do it but I’ve never used music.  It’s not like we need it.”

“Garnet put some music on when we tried so I thought it was best practice for beginners.  I don’t want to get this wrong and mess it up for you.  It’s important that it’s —”

Jasper crouched down and put a hand on Peridot’s shoulder, stopping her.  “Don’t worry about it.  Any fusion that  _ doesn’t _ result in months of misery is a step up as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, that’s a pretty low standard, and I think you should want more,” Peridot mumbled.

“I’ve spent too much of my life expecting to be perfect, so I thought this time we should just shoot for pretty good and it’ll be all upward from there.”  Jasper squeezed her shoulder.  “It’s not up to you to make this just right for me any more than it was to make everything okay for Lapis.”

“I mean, I can’t even probably offer you what’s really important to you in a fusion, we’re not likely to be very strong or powerful —”

“Jeez, Peridot, do you think that’s still what I’m after?”

“It’s not?”  Peridot blinked at her.  

“Well, it’s — it’s great if it happens but it’s not the definition of success.”

“But there are times, you know, our late-night heart-to-hearts, when you’ve talked about how strong and powerful you felt as Malachite and what it was like to fly just for that short time and you sounded so full of wist.”

“And I thought when I said that it was a given that it wouldn’t be worth going back to that.”

“But if you could have that now with someone who didn’t hurt you…”

“No, I — aargh.”  Jasper pushed her fingers into her hair, feeling her face heat up.  It felt like no matter how she tried to say things, Peridot was going to misunderstand, so she was going to have to cut right to the embarrassing stuff.  “I don’t care about that the way I used to.  The thing that’s going to feel like success is if we fuse and… and you want to stay.  You don’t get scared of me or… repulsed.  I’m afraid that’s just what I’m like.  That I’m bad inside, and anyone who fuses with me is going to see that in a way I can’t do anything about.”  She stopped because her throat was hurting and her voice was beginning to shake.

“Oh,” said Peridot in a small voice.

“So it’s scary because if that  _ is _ what happens, then things can never be the same for us and I’ll  _ know _ there’s something really wrong with me.  I worry about that even more than if corruption could be catching.”

Peridot took a deep breath, stepped forward and hugged Jasper around the neck, resting her head on her shoulder.  “Well, I’m not expecting that.  You can be  _ difficult. _  You can be intimidating or say mean things.  I don’t think that means you’re bad inside.  I’ve been mean and scary too, and you don’t think  _ I’m _ bad inside, do you?”

“Of course not,” Jasper said, surprised, and then “When were  _ you _ scary?”

“I was a terror!  You were just underwater so you didn’t get to witness it.  Also how about that time I stabbed you?”

“You’ve never stabbed me.”

“I totally stabbed you!  I thought we just weren’t mentioning it because honestly it’s very awkward.”

“What year, month, day, hour, minute and second did you stab me?” Jasper asked, baffled.

“I wasn’t looking at a  _ clock,” _ Peridot said, stepping back from her and waving her arms to illustrate.  “You turned into a corruption beast and went on the attack and I made some of those bent metal bars you’d used to make cages fly with my mind and they went right through your body and you went poof.  Okay, technically I suppose we should say I  _ impaled _ you rather than I stabbed you.  Is that what this is, semantics?”

Jasper blinked slowly.  “I can’t remember that at all.”

“Oh.”  Peridot’s shoulders sagged a bit.  “Even a little bit?”

She shook her head.  “I can’t remember any of that clearly.  I just remember lots of rage and pain and total confusion, not who exactly took me out or how.”  She brightened up.  “Check you out, though!  The mongoose strikes.  I had no idea you were so dangerous.”  She gave Peridot’s upper arm a little slap of praise which knocked her slightly sideways.

“So wait, I ran you through with a length of rusty metal and you’re not just not upset, you’re  _ impressed?” _

“Damn right I’m impressed.  I might not be so generous if I remembered how it  _ felt, _ but honestly a metal bar through the gut was the least of my worries at that point.”

“We have a weird friendship,” Peridot said, nodding slowly.

“We do, don’t we.”  Jasper rocked back on her haunches, chuckling.  “That actually lightened the mood.  Let’s do this.  We don’t need music.”

“Right!”

“Get your stilts on.”

Peridot ran off and came clanking back, looking bright-eyed but also sweaty with nerves, to where Jasper waited in the garden.  “Okay,” she said, “as ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Right,” Jasper said, clapping her hands together briskly.  “I guess I’m the one with more experience, so I’ll… lead… kind of.  There’ll be some making this up as we go.”  She considered their height difference.  She couldn’t expect Peridot to know what she was doing, the way Lapis had seemed to, so she couldn’t just provide the anchor for Peridot to dance  _ around.   _ It was better for this to be different from that.  “Put your hands on my hips.  I’ll put mine on your shoulders.  Good.  And follow me.”  She took a step back and Peridot stumbled forward with a clank.  Awkwardly, they moved in circles, Pumpkin scampering behind them and yipping disapprovingly.

“Nothing’s happening,” Peridot muttered.  She was staring down between them to watch Jasper’s feet with extreme concentration, dots of sweat standing out on the sides of her small, pointed nose.

“Are you thinking that you want to fuse?” Jasper asked.

“Oh!  Crud, I forgot.”

“How did you forget that part?”

“I was concentrating on the dancing!”

“The dancing doesn’t even matter that much.  Have you seen Rubies do this?  They just jump into a formation together.  The point is you move in unison, in a purposeful way, and you focus on wanting to fuse.”

“No one teaches you these things in Kindergartening,” Peridot grumbled, but she lifted her eyes from Jasper’s feet and added, “Okay, focusing purposefully.”

After that, it was just a step or two away.

 

As Chrysoprase lifted her head and looked up at the stars, she was conscious of two distant voices, a part of her mind and yet not exactly her own thoughts.

_ Are we doing it?  Oh my stars, we’re doing it! _

_ Don’t wiggle around so much. _

_ I’m not wiggling, I don’t have a body right now. _

_ You feel wiggly. _

_ I would hope so!  This is incredible!  We’re so big!   _ Way  _ bigger than you!  We’ve got four eyes!  Four eyes, baby!  Look how weird our arms are!  They branch!  So cool!  What are we?  We feel like a chalcedony.  Wow, thunder thighs, am I right? _

_ Don’t  _ slap _ them.  I could get used to these arms, though. _

_ Let’s run around!  Woo! _

That idea felt good to Chrysoprase, and she went bounding down the hillside towards the beach.  The smaller voice, the very excited one, was hooting and chortling and the bigger one, which seemed more reluctant to get carried away, more hesitant to trust how this felt, was nevertheless starting to give off a kind of rumbling, grinding chuckle.  She ploughed into the loose sand at the top of the beach, kicking up big sprays of it that pattered down on her head and shoulders, and leapt down to the firmer wet sand by the ripples where she kicked up a shining arc of water and felt it rain down on her upturned face.  She spat and blinked and laughed again.

_ We feel so strong!  Is everything stronger?  I have to see! _

_ What are you doing? _

_ Feel my power, you dumb beach!  Ahahahahaha! _

Chrysoprase raised all four of her hands, strength flowing through her, calling to every bit of metal she could reach.  There was a  _ lot _ of it buried in the layers of sand; coins, rings, lost watches, broken and corroded weapons, sifted down over hundreds of years, and for her it all came to the surface with a rush and hovered glittering dully in the starlight.

_ Did you freakin’  _ see _ that!? _

_ With our own four eyes! _

_ It’s never come up like that before!  There was like no resistance!  We’re amazing! _

_ Hey, can we — let me try.   _ The bigger voice was getting excited now too, and Chrysoprase liked its idea.  She brought her hands together with a grunt, crushing and crumpling all the bits of metal into one jagged chunk, smacking it again and again to agitate its atoms until it grew hot, molten, and she formed it into a spinning globe that flattened from its poles into a whirling disc.   _ Pretty neat, right? _

_ This is like that frizzybee game Steven and Amethyst showed me!  Look, look!   _ Moved by the smaller voice’s enthusiasm, Chrysophrase pulled her arms back and whizzed the disc out over the dark waves.  It skipped with a mighty fizz and hiss of steam, and again, and again, rushing out towards the horizon as if it would never stop until it rounded the world and hit them from behind.  Chrysoprase danced at the water’s edge, wide-eyed and breathless and thrilled.

And then there was a terrible, huge, metallic clang, followed by a tearing, rending kind of shriek.  Lights near the horizon that were not stars lurched and moved, and then flares shot up, distress signals.

_ Oh… dear. _

_ Peridot I think you killed a ship.   _

_ Well, what was it doing there at night!? _

_ I don’t know!  I don’t understand transport!  I only ever touched a boat once and that was mainly punching it! _

_ This is very, very, not good.  Hold up.  Hold up!  Their vehicles and vessels are mostly made of metal!  Even if it’s filling up with water we can make it  _ not sink. _  Come on, come on. _

Feeling a rush of panicky urgency, Chrysoprase bounded into the water, the cold wet shocking her as it rushed up her legs and broke against her belly.  Standing hip-deep in the waves, she reached out with her augmented power and felt the ship, leaning heavily to one side with a gash torn in its bows, and gripped it and lifted it clear of the ocean, water pouring out of its wounds.  She was strong but this was  _ hard; _ her back burned and her skin streamed with sweat.  

_ Okay, great, now what do we  _ do _ with it?  I may be strong but I can’t hold this thing all night. _

_ Well, uh… the problem is that if it’s in the water, it’ll fill up and sink.  Yes?   _

_ Yes, obviously.  And we do  _ not _ have power over water! _

_ That’s only a problem while it’s  _ in _ the water.  Concentrate with me.  We’re going to pull it in and just set it down nice and neatly on the beach on the town side of the headland.  No one will be on the sand at night.  If they are they’ll see something this big coming in time to step out of the way.  And then everything will be fine because the humans can take care of their own.  They’ll all be perfectly safe. _

_ I hope you know what you’re talking about, but I’m damned if I have a better plan. _

Chrysoprase narrowed her eyes, frowning in concentration.  The ship groaned like a wounded beast as she lifted it and drew it in towards her, hand over hand, and then carefully lifted it over, following and peering round the headland toward the town.  The lighthouse’s beam caught it as the ship passed in front of it, and Chrysoprase saw humans clinging to the railings of the deck, swaying helplessly, and heard the gabble of their panicked voices.  “Calm down!” she called out, hearing her own voice for the first time.  “You’re being rescued.”  

Unaccountably, that didn’t shut them up, so she gave up on communication because it was taking all her strength now just to keep it up in the air.  It was steadily sinking as she brought it in to land, not only because she was lowering it with care but because she simply couldn’t hold it up any longer.  Finally the hull touched the sand of the beach and settled with a huge groaning of metal.  Lights were going on all over town and headlights streaming towards the beach.  Chrysoprase sagged with relief and exhaustion, retreated around the headland and waded back to shore.  She reached the sand and dropped onto her hands and knees, then rolled onto her back and lay looking up at the sky, breathing heavily.  

She felt exhilarated, and bewildered, and proud and scared and above all  _ pooped.   _ What she’d done just now, she was pretty sure, had been a feat of fantastic proportions.  It might even be unprecedented.  She both wished there had been Gems around to see it and suspected she was going to get yelled at if they had.

“Worth it,” she said, and grinned fiercely into the night.  “So worth it.”  Then, just for now, she let go and was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chrysoprase, chrysophrase or chrysoprasus is a gemstone variety of chalcedony (a cryptocrystalline form of silica) that contains small quantities of nickel. Its color is normally apple-green, but varies to deep green. (...) Chrysoprase is cryptocrystalline, which means that it is composed of crystals so fine that they cannot be seen as distinct particles under normal magnification. This sets it apart from rock crystal, amethyst, citrine, and the other varieties of crystalline quartz. Other members of the cryptocrystalline silica family include agate, carnelian, and onyx. Unlike many non-transparent silica minerals, it is the color of chrysoprase, rather than any pattern of markings, that makes it desirable. The word chrysoprase comes from the Greek χρυσός chrysos meaning 'gold' and πράσινον prasinon, meaning 'green'. ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysoprase))
> 
> [Chrysoprase] brings through the vibration of Divine Truth, and promotes joy and happiness, while healing the heart of energies of depression and anxiety.  
> It has metaphysical properties for healing as well as being a stone to attract new love and abundance and prosperity. ([Healing Crystals For You](https://www.healing-crystals-for-you.com/chrysoprase.html))
> 
> (Chrysoprase is also the name of a notorious troll gangster in the criminal underworld of Ankh-Morpork in the Discworld books, but that's neither here nor there.)
> 
> [Here is the theme song of this fic.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKTzQqB7tWk)


	5. Chapter 5

After Chrysoprase, Jasper and Peridot had simply gone back up the hill to the lighthouse, climbed the stairs and fell on Jasper’s bed with exhausted satisfaction.  It wasn’t so much the physical exertion as the emotional charge of the whole thing that had knocked them flat, Peridot thought. They both slept deeply until well into the next morning, when she woke up aware of how sandy they both still were.  It might have been smarter to rinse off with the garden hose before going indoors, but neither of them had thought of it. She lay in her somewhat scratchy nest of sand and blanket, looking fondly at Jasper’s still sleeping face, bathed in golden sunlight from the uncurtained window.  

_ It worked! _ she thought gleefully.   _ I can do it, I can do fusion!  Nothing I was worried about happened.  Nothing she was worried about happened!  Well, I assume I’d feel different if I was corrupted in my sleep.   _ She looked at her own arms, green as a new leaf, and stretched her legs experimentally under the blanket.  All absolutely normal. She already missed Chrysoprase’s long legs, and gosh, those branched arms would be useful; how many times had she wished for another pair of hands?

_ I wonder who I’ll make with Amethyst?  With Garnet, with Pearl even — oh, with Steven, Steven should be fun! _

Her elation ebbed as the inevitable thought occurred,  _ I wonder who I could have made with Lapis.  If she had wanted to. If I’d been able to help her get over it.   _ Peridot took a deep breath.   _ Now you don’t know if that would have been any good,  _ she told herself firmly.   _ You want to think it would have been because honestly, you want to mope some more about not being perfectly perfect for Lapis, and you don’t need to think about that.  What you do know is that what you did with Jasper was  _ very _ good and you both had fun and you both found there was less wrong with you than you thought, and that is important.  _

She snuggled in under Jasper’s arm to remind herself of how warm she felt, and how in Chrysoprase she’d felt the warmth all the way through her.  The movement disturbed Jasper slightly and she turned her head, eyes half-opening before a drowsy smile dawned. She hugged Peridot closer and mumbled, “G’morning, mongoose,” into her hair.  

“Good morning,” Peridot replied, slightly muffled.  She considered calling Jasper “pumpkin” in return but even if it was a good name for her, Pumpkin had dibs.  She rather wanted something to call Jasper  _ back.   _ If she was like a mongoose (presumably because of her fearsome courage despite her diminutive size), Jasper could be like a tiger or a lion, but they also already knew someone called Lion so tiger it was.  Tigers were prettier anyway. She’d left too long of a pause after “good morning” to say it right now, though. 

“Thanks for last night,” Jasper said quietly.  

“It’s mutual,” Peridot said, “but you should say  _ wow _ , thanks when it’s something special.”  She’d been a bit embarrassed when Amethyst had pointed out that you didn’t have to include the  _ wow  _ every time, and was trying not to overuse it with her.  Fusion definitely rated a formal wow, though. 

“Wow,” Jasper amended, and rubbed her cheek on Peridot’s head.  “Also wow, you are  _ really _ sandy.  Feel like I’m hugging the beach.”

“That’s you too,” Peridot said.  “Shower?”

“I don’t like banging my head on the shower head.  I’ll just use the hose. Then let’s go down to the Temple and tell Steven and Amethyst!”  She sounded more fired up than Peridot had heard her in a long time. 

“And Pearl,” Peridot said slyly.  

“If she’s around.  Don’t embarrass me!”

 

When they arrived at the Temple Jasper’s enthusiasm dimmed a little; Garnet was visible on the deck, sitting with Steven at the picnic table under the sun umbrella on the deck.  Steven spotted them and stood up on his chair, waving. 

“Hey you two!”

“Steven!”  Peridot decided to let Jasper be weird about Garnet if she wanted to and scampered up the steps, using her hands as well as feet on a couple of them.  “Hi!” she exclaimed at the top. “You’ll never guess our big news.”

“Don’t suppose it had anything to do with a beached ship,” Garnet said calmly.  

“That was us!” Peridot cried gleefully. 

“Why are you guys sinking ships?” Steven asked, looking dismayed.  

“We didn’t  _ try _ to sink it,” Jasper said, arriving behind Peridot.  “We were testing out a new power and it was… collateral damage.”

“You discovered  _ another _ new power?” he exclaimed.  

“Not exactly,” Peridot said.  “My known and awesome power augmented by Jasper’s strength — because — we were fused!  Ta-daa!”

Their reaction was all she could have wished.  Steven squealed, Garnet gave her a small but distinct smile and a thumbs-up, and Pearl came out to see what all the squealing was about, dropped the cereal bowl and dish towel she was holding when she heard and virtually flew over to hug Jasper.  Judging from her face Jasper found this equal parts astonishing, embarrassing and delightful. Pearl might have been embarrassed too because she bustled off immediately afterwards to find Amethyst so she didn’t miss out on the fuss. Then Amethyst was there and roaring with excitement and hugging her and pouncing on Jasper, and while they engaged in some kind of Quartz mutual head-knuckling ceremony Peridot got a pat on the back from Garnet and a warm handshake from Pearl and an extra squishy hug from Steven and all in all it was the kind of approbation she’d always wanted.  

“I have to call Connie!” Steven exclaimed.  “She’s gotta see you.  _ Can _ she see you?  You can do it again, right?”

“Can ya do it again without sinking a ship?” Amethyst asked, sitting on Jasper’s shoulders and holding her hair in two tufts.

“We didn’t  _ try _ to sink it,” Jasper said again.

“That  _ was _ kinda bad,” Steven said.  “The crew were really upset.  Mayor Nanefua organised everyone to take care of them.”

“Oh come on.  Was there any loss of life?” Peridot demanded.

“I don’t  _ think _ any of them had more than scrapes and bruises,” Pearl said, rolling her eyes, “but there was so much carrying  _ on.” _

“Ensign Henson broke her pinky finger falling over,” Steven said, “but I kissed it better so she’s okay.  Everyone else was just rattled.”

“There, then it’s all okay!” Peridot said.

“How’d you even do that?” Amethyst asked.  “Didja just tear it apart?”

“We didn’t  _ tear _ anything,” Jasper said indignantly.  “I’m telling you we didn’t even know the dumb ship was there.  We were messing around on the beach and we made a big hot… frizzybee thing out of scrap metal and then we just wanted to see how far we could throw it.  We made a mistake but we cleaned it up,” she concluded in a grumble.

“We would all love to meet your new fusion,” Pearl said hopefully, bobbing slightly on her toes.

“Ooh, what’s her name?” Steven asked.

“Chrysoprase,” Jasper and Peridot said together.  

“Can I call her Chrys?” Amethyst asked, vaulting down to the deck.  “Ooh, or Crispy. I think I’ll call her Crispy.”

“Ask  _ Chrysoprase _ if she likes that,” Garnet suggested.  

“I will, if she gets her act together and I can  _ see  _ her.”

“Scuse us,” said Jasper, and towed Peridot away towards the house door before crouching down so that her broad back screened them from view as they conferred.  “You feel okay to do that?” she asked quietly. 

“Of course I do, why wouldn’t I?”

“We don’t have your cans,” Jasper pointed out.  “And I thought you might be nervous. In front of Amethyst.”

“Should I be?  No, wait,  _ you’re  _ nervous and you want  _ me _ to be your excuse!”  She felt quite astute for seeing that.  

“Shut up, can’t you?” Jasper hissed.  “The whole world doesn’t need to hear.”

“Well, I’ll  _ be _ your excuse, just  _ ask _ instead of trying to be tricky.”

“No,” Jasper said, frowning.  “I know I’m being a wimp. I just — call it a moment of weakness, okay?  Moment over, back to kicking ass.” She stood up abruptly. 

“Whatever you say, tiger.”  Jasper gave her an odd look.  “I call you tiger now,” Peridot explained. 

“Better than clod, I guess.”

“I’ve never called you a clod!”

“You think I couldn’t hear you muttering on the ship coming out?” Jasper asked.  She grinned briefly. “You were such a little turd,” she said, ruffling and somewhat crushing Peridot’s hair. 

“I’ve never called you a clod since we’ve been friends,” Peridot amended, pushing it more or less back into shape.  

“I did notice.  C’mon, let’s do this.”  Jasper vaulted down from the deck to the beach (probably because Pearl was watching and she wanted to look athletic, not that Peridot objected on those grounds) and Peridot followed her down the steps with a little more decorum.  “This is a little trickier without you up on cans,” Jasper said thoughtfully. “Not impossible. It could work better if I pick you up and swing you round, you up for that?”

“Could you bounce me up in the air and catch me?” Peridot asked eagerly. 

“You’re getting ambitious now,” Jasper said. 

“Well, I want to look cool too.  I’m gonna do a flip.”

“Have you ever done a flip in mid-air in your life?”

“Not  _ intentionally.” _  There had been instances of hurtling or plummeting that Peridot didn’t feel like getting into right now.  

Jasper looked down at her, frowning.  Fortunately by now Peridot recognised that as her considering frown, as distinct from her angry frown, her concentrating frown, her anxious frown, her curious frown and her embarrassed frown.  “Why not?” she said, shrugging one shoulder. “I’ll catch you whether you make the flip or not. Give it your best shot.”

“I believe in you, Peridot, I know you can do it, Peridot.”

“Is that your version of my voice?  You sound like an accident. Here, step in my hands and I’ll throw you up.”  Jasper crouched and made a stirrup of her hands. 

“Right.”  Peridot steadied herself on Jasper’s arm and stepped up.  Before she was completely ready the world was rushing downward away from her and she was forcibly reminded that Jasper was  _ freakishly  _ strong and suddenly there was nothing under her feet any more and she was still flying up to the sky.  She didn’t know if she was managing to soar gracefully or just looked like she was being chucked cloudwards.  She no longer had the slightest confidence in her ability to do a flip and frankly this was terrifying so she tucked herself into a ball and surprisingly found that the motion tipped her forward.  Then she was plummeting and tumbling over and over and had just time to think  _ Catch me, Jasper!  _ before she had the curious sensation of at once being caught in Jasper’s hands and falling  _ through  _ them as everything changed.  

One thing that Peridot hadn’t even realised she was worried about until after fusion had  _ worked _ and she was feeling relieved that this  _ hadn’t _ happened was that it might mean she somehow temporarily wouldn’t exist.  That the fusion would be another person with a will of her own and that she would be doing things Peridot had no say about and might not even know were happening until the fusion was over and she discovered the aftermath, like waking up to find Pumpkin had been chewing things in the night although potentially much, much worse.  

Chrysoprase did have a mind of her own but she didn’t  _ want _ to do anything Peridot didn’t want to do.  Her wishes and intentions were Peridot’s, and equally Jasper’s, and if there was any conflict between those she just had to stop and think about it like any other person with a dilemma.  Peridot knew exactly what was going on and that was just the way she liked it. The sensation of strength and vigour was absolutely intoxicating, not to mention the sheer rush of altitude.  

Chrysoprase straightened up from the curl that was the combined result of Peridot’s cannonball drop and Jasper’s bending at the knees to catch her and stretched her arms over her head, feeling sunshine on her skin for the first time and loving it.  She had an audience; Steven was whooping with glee, Amethyst could apparently only give voice to her feelings by barking like a dog, Pearl was applauding and Garnet went so far as to offer two thumbs up. 

“Hey, you’re not as tall as I was thinking,” Amethyst said, abandoning barking as a mode of expression and hopping down from the deck railing.  

“I’m tall,” Chrysoprase said, a little miffed.  She’d been hoping for something a little more complimentary.  

“Yeah, but not  _ giant.   _ You’re, what, half a head taller’n Jasper?”

“Fusions aren’t always a  _ lot  _ bigger than their component Gems,” Garnet said.  “You never know until you try.”

“Very true,” said Pearl, “and you know, it varies by individuals.  If I were to fuse with a different Amethyst we wouldn’t just get another copy of Opal.  She could be taller or shorter and have different features.”

“I didn’t know that,” Steven said, reaching the foot of the steps.  

“Oh yes.  Your Smoky Quartz isn’t the same as the one Amethyst and Rose could form either.”

“Wai-wai-wait,” said Amethyst, “I knew about Smokes but you’re telling me if we went back to the Zoo you could make a completely different Opal with each of the Fam?”

“Of course,” said Pearl.  

“You  _ would _ , wouldn’t you,” Amethyst said, raising one eyebrow.

“There’s no need to say it in  _ that _ tone of voice.  Anyway, we’re stealing Chrysoprase’s thunder,” Pearl said hastily.  “How do you feel, Chrysoprase?”

“I feel great!” Chrysoprase said.  “Strong and smart and ready for anything.”  One of the interesting things about being  _ her, _ she was realising, was that she knew things that both Jasper and Peridot knew and felt, although she wasn’t sure each of them knew all that she knew.  She really did have two pairs of eyes, but in a more figurative way it was also like having two points of view at once. When she looked at Pearl she had the dual impression of appreciating her as a colleague of surprising intellect and technical competence, and of having a great big embarrassing crush on her, complicated by a lot of guilt about having looked down on her, and on Pearls in general, in the past.  It seemed as if Jasper both wanted Pearl to like her and didn’t really think she deserved that. Looking at Garnet was even stranger because she could feel both Peridot’s admiration of her and Jasper’s strange, stomach-churning combination of fear, resentment and envy. Come to think of it, she had a  _ stomach,  _ which Peridot had never had and Jasper had only recently added to her form at Amethyst’s recommendation.  Neat. And Amethyst, they both liked Amethyst but there it was Peridot’s feelings that were more crushy and embarrassing, while Jasper’s were more fond and grateful with an additional kicker of further guilt.  Actually, guilt seemed to be part of how Jasper felt about everyone  _ but _ Peridot.  

Interesting as all that was, Chrysoprase was starting to lose patience with it.  She was excited to stretch out and explore what she could do in the world, so she thought they could just have their weird, muddled feelings and she wouldn’t worry about them unless she had to.  “Who wants to see what I can do?” she asked. 

“Oh!  Me! Me!” said Steven. 

“Behold!”  Chrysoprase repeated last night’s trick over on this end of the beach, the sand dancing and shivering as she lifted its burden of metal to the surface.  

“Oh,” said Pearl, “I  _ wondered _ what happened to that claymore.”

 

“That was pretty great, wasn’t it?”  Peridot rolled over and poked Jasper in the ribs.

“You’ve asked me that, what, six times now?” Jasper grumbled.  “Yes, it was great. You did great. I did great. We were great in unison.  But the seventh time I stuff your head in my armpit.”

“I’m not afraid of your armpit,” said Peridot, rolling back and resuming her contemplation of the stars.  They had spread out Jasper’s blanket on the grass beside the lighthouse because there was supposed to be a meteor shower tonight and that seemed interesting.  It wasn’t clear if the meteors knew they were supposed to be showering. There was nothing so far but normal stars, twinkling, the moon and a few passing tatters of cloud.

“I guess that’s true,” Jasper said.  “You do practically sleep in it.” They were both quiet for a while, looking up.  At length Jasper said, “Wonder where  _ she _ is.  Up there, I mean.”

“Well, she’s not necessarily in the direction we’re facing,” Peridot said.  “Space isn’t just  _ up. _  It’s around all sides of the planet.  She’s  _ more _ likely to be in some other direction than  _ this. _  Logically.”

“Oh, so she probably won’t get this, then,” Jasper said, raising one hand skyward in a very rude gesture.  Peridot gave a blurt of startled, slightly shocked laughter, then raised her hand to match. “Guess who doesn’t need you?” Jasper asked the void of space.  

“Guess who has a new home?” Peridot added.  

“Guess who’s doing great without you?”  Jasper concluded with a raspberry and lowered her arm to lie curled by her head, a faint smile on her lips.  

“Oh, so  _ you’re  _ allowed to say it’s great.”

“I haven’t said it six times already.”  Jasper paused a moment before asking, “Do you feel any different?”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know.  Stronger. Calmer.  That’s how I feel. I still worry a little that you’re going to break out, but getting through it twice without anything horrible happening has eased that a lot.”

“It  _ was _ a real confidence-booster.”

“You think maybe…”  She trailed off. 

“Maybe what?”

“Well,” Jasper said more decisively, “we need to keep doing it.  Give Chrysoprase the opportunity to learn and grow. It was pretty special for her that the others brought out a bunch of their fusions to meet her, Smoky Quartz and Opal and that hyper thing with the gap in her teeth — what’d they call her?”

“Sardonyx.”

“And I was thinking, we need to try out shapeshifting while we’re her.  Because maybe that could help you do it by yourself too.”

“I don’t know about that,” Peridot said, lifting her legs up in the air and trying to frame the moon between her feet.  “The fact we can share our powers while fused doesn’t mean it carries over afterwards. You haven’t got any residual ferrokinetic talent.”

“I still think maybe you can do it, you just don’t know how to get there,” said Jasper.  “It’s like kneading.”

“I think it’s more wanting than needing.”

“No, kneading like baking, like when I help Pearl.  See, warm hands like mine are good for kneading bread dough.  Pearl isn’t as good at that because her hands are always cool.  But that means she’s better at making pastry. She can rub the butter into the flour without it melting.  If I try to do that it just goes greasy and messy. But anyway, when she was teaching me kneading she would do some and then give the dough to me to do some, so I could feel how it was meant to be, how the texture changes, and we’d take turns so I could learn what it’s meant to feel like and I could observe her form.  If she’d just told me how to do it I think it would be a lot harder to learn.”

“I  _ bet  _ you observed her form.”

“Non-creepily, yes.  Pearl says I’m a kinetic learner.  I understand new things better when I can handle them and feel them.  I think if you can feel what shapeshifting is like from within Chrysoprase, you might be able to pull it off on your own.  If you can’t it should still be interesting, right?”

“Yeah… it should be.”  Peridot held Jasper’s hand, feeling that sun-baked warmth.  She wasn’t sure any of it was going to work out, but it felt as if that warmth and strength were going to surround her and support her no matter what.   _ Wow.  Thanks.   _

“Ooh!  Meteor!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's really the end of this story. Imagine the camera slowly pulling back from the shot of the two of them lying on their blanket, making wishes. It didn't have a lot of plot but I feel like I managed to leave them somewhere better than they started.


End file.
